


Duplicity of the Afterglow

by agoodwoman



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Season 11, X-Files revival, episode fic, plus one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-04 21:20:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13373283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agoodwoman/pseuds/agoodwoman
Summary: Set during Plus One in Season 11





	1. Chapter 1

It wasn’t that they hadn’t tried or they didn’t want or intend to reconcile. As the years had passed since she left the house they shared for all that time under the cloak and dagger of hiding him as a fugitive, it became entirely the opposite.

Out of a need to see him and before they reopened the X-Files, she came back from time to time. In return, he had visited her in the city at the apartment he called everything their ordinary house was not.

Once they went back to the FBI, their time apart after hours became a need for solace from the intensity of working alongside one another in their old basement office again. There were memories of their time down there that included some of the most heated moments of her life, and she wasn’t just thinking of when they argued over the validity of a falsified photo of a UFO. Some of those memories included being bent over Mulder’s desk with her skirt around her waist and his breath hot in her ear as he pumped inside of her. She tried not to think about those moments too often because it only led to another lapse in judgement. Since he began working his government job again, there had been one or two frenzied conjugations while they watched the door for visitors to their quiet enclave in the bowels of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

She was trying desperately not to think of that now.

Scully watched as Mulder gave her a small demonstration with Arkie Seaver’s mugshots of his car accident. She felt annoyance creep into her belly. As per usual, Mulder slowly revealed the mass phenomenon of suicides from a rare form of schizophrenia. Nevertheless, there was a paranormal force at work and they had the job of investigating it.

If they stopped talking or she didn’t have an exit strategy, she might feel her guard fall and the longing set in for the warmth of his embrace and his mouth against hers. The only option was to continue to argue his point with science that she knew and reference any science she could pull out of her hat.

“Precisely my thinking Scully,” Mulder said with a nod as he stood up from behind his desk. “Which is why you and I are going to jump on I-95 South this morning and get back to our bread and butter.”

Mulder swept his arm across the back of his chair to pick up his coat as he finished that sentence and brushed past her to leave. She tossed the case file on the desk and grabbed her purse to follow him to the parkade. He grabbed her overnight bag from her trunk and tossed it into the back of his vehicle before they left for Henrico County. It was two hours away but if their day ran long, neither of them would want to try to make the drive back.

As they pulled into a gas station outside Old Church, Virginia, she pressed her thighs together and tried not to admire the way that Mulder looked exceptionally cool in his sunglasses, grey suit and white pressed shirt. He was taking care of himself now that he had a routine. He made comments frequently about how good she looked but she recognized how sporadically she complimented him.

Mulder glanced at her with confused eyes and a grin. “What?”

“You look good,” she commented and he raised his eyebrows in obvious surprise. She shook her head a little and tried to backtrack. “You look _happy_.”

He pursed his lips as he took off his sunglasses and tucked them into the front pocket of his suit jacket. “I like these cases. It’s these isolated incidents and pockets of abnormality that we get confirmation that it’s not just the mundane that fills our lives but smaller than the phenomenon of extraterrestrials visiting our planet to experiment on us like lab rats.”

She scoffed. “I wasn’t expecting that answer but I would have to agree, Mulder.”

He raised an eyebrow, mimicking her skeptical stare that she usually gave him. “ _Really_?”

She ran her tongue along her upper lip and nodded. “It’s exciting to have our work relate to science but have so little of it confined to a lab.”

Mulder nodded as he thought about that. “Here I thought it was my charming company.”

She smiled and reached for the door handle. “I’m getting some water. You need seeds?”

“Flirt,” he jibed. They exited the SUV and she pulled her purse up her shoulder. “And yes.”

Scully entered the small convenience store where a coffee station called to her. Her heels clicked along the tile floor and she glanced over to the young woman behind the counter as she scrolled through her phone with a bored look on her face.

Thirty years ago, Scully could have been that young woman on summer break. She went through a rebellious phase where she wore too much black eyeliner, smoked cigarettes in secret and felt minimum wage jobs were a joke. The punk phase ended abruptly when she used CPR on a friend at a concert and realized medicine gave her a bigger thrill than anything else to date.

“Hi there,” the young woman muttered as she passed the counter.

“Hello,” Scully greeted as she looked out to where Mulder was at the pump. “I’ll be paying for the tank of gas at number seven too.”

The uniform was barely buttoned up over the tight tank top against the young woman’s skin and the name “Danny” was stitched into the shirt. She felt her age and the passing of time so acutely when faced with youth and beauty she admired. This young woman had her whole life ahead of her that probably had nothing to do with medical rape by conspirators against the global population or even anything outside of this small town. Something unexciting might be nice in comparison to the ways she had suffered over the years.

“Ok,” Danny replied and pressed a few keys into the register before going back to her phone.

Scully filled two coffee cups, gathered a large bottle of water and a bag of sunflower seeds along with a few sweet treats for later. She used a drink tray to carry most of the items to the counter. Mulder walked in with a swagger of his hips and found her at the register. He slapped his company credit card on the counter before taking the seeds from Scully’s fingers.

“You scan these?” Mulder asked the young woman as he ripped open the perforated edge with his teeth.

The attendant set down her phone and gave him a shake of her head with a secretive smile.

Mulder held the package out and Danny scanned it across the infrared gun before putting it back in his outstretched palm. Scully cleared her throat as she felt like an interloper of a moment being held between two people of inappropriate age differences. Danny couldn’t be older than her early twenties.

“How much?” Scully prompted.

Danny tucked her curly black hair behind her ear and smiled at Mulder again before scanning the rest of the snacks. She typed in a few more codes and looked at Mulder.

“Seventy-two oh five with the gas,” Danny announced.

“Did you get premium?” Scully muttered as Mulder pushed the card across the glass countertop.

“ _No._ Regular,” he replied and gave Danny another look.

These were the times she began to feel invisible. While she knew she was attractive, she also understood her limitations. It was being amongst women with more curves and fewer age lines that she felt her small stature and flaws with a sharpness that made her invisible.

Mulder was handsome, fit, single and had all his hair. To any woman, he was a catch and their infrequent trysts together in bed weren’t enough to keep him from looking for a woman that would provide him with a family, a home and the emotional availability he had been pushing her for.

After he signed the receipt for their goods, Mulder tucked the seeds into his pocket. Danny put the water and other items in the bag and Scully took the receipt out of Mulder’s fingers after Danny gave it to her.

“Are you going to remember where you stuck this?” Scully asked as she slipped the paper into her purse. He shook his head. “Right.”

Mulder put his hand on her shoulder and they walked out of the gas station. His exchange with the young woman had obviously left his memory because he gave her side a squeeze before opening her door for her.

“You’re in a mood,” she commented.

He held the coffee tray for her as she climbed in and closed the door after she took the bag and drinks from him.

He got in next to her and buckled his seatbelt. “It’s not every day I get compliments from the elusive and _enigmatic_ Dana Scully.”

“Here I thought it was the young woman who gave you sex eyes,” she muttered as she fastened her own buckle.

Mulder scoffed as he turned the ignition. “I _never_.”

“I believe the phrase is ‘I can’t even.’ If you’re going to pick up women that-”

“ _Scully_ ,” he cut her off with a harsher tone than she was used to from him. He cleared his throat and said softly, “Seriously. Tone it down. She was being _nice_.”

Maybe she had been spending too much time around Mulder in their downtime and she felt possessive over him without warranted reasons. For good reason, most of their downtime was spent apart. It appeared that a separation suited them better because under the same roof, without the effort they continually put into their marriage, it was strained and too difficult.

“Sorry,” she muttered and took a sip of her coffee. “I just… I thought _you_ were-”

“I _wasn’t_ ,” he affirmed and reached across the vehicle to squeeze her knee. “Promise.”

She felt her cheeks pink and patted his hand lightly. Mulder turned his hand over to squeeze her fingers and brought her hand to his lips. He kissed the back of it lightly and the lower part of her belly did a flip.

“Still friends?” he requested with a look a puppy might give its owner after peeing in a pair of shoes.

Scully nodded and pulled her hand back. Mulder donned his sunglasses again but she caught a look of hurt flash through them as they slid up his nose. His coolness was restored and he put the car in drive for them to get to the county jail in time to meet Arkie Seaver.

His interview was only more confusing. It only furthered Scully’s theory of drug and alcohol abuse but he provided the exact location to where he crashed his car.

The bright sunshine of Henrico County was warm on her skin and she felt the nostalgia of spending so many years examining strange evidence on the side of small highways. Mulder had his sunglasses on as he continued to portray the cool man in black - or charcoal grey in his instance. At his age, he wore the suit well and contrasted against the vast wilderness only metres away from them.

“His story makes a lot of sense,” Mulder announced as he approached her.

“Arkie’s double takes control of the wheel,” she repeated, laden with doubt.

“Yeah and then Arkie pumps the breaks with his left foot,” Mulder described as he backed up towards her and pointed to the black streaks of rubber on the asphalt. “Producing the skid marks that start up yonder.”

“Or there’s another explanation of course,” she countered as she walked towards the marks they were arguing over. “Which is that Arkie falls asleep at the wheel, waking up to find that he’s going off the highway, and applying the brakes there.”

“Yeah, but if he was asleep,” Mulder rejoined as he approached from behind. “He wouldn’t have been going at such a dangerous rate of speed.”

“You’re saying you believe him,” she stated with disbelief.

Standing on the side of the road while they examined skid marks was all too familiar. It was a case of I see this theory and you see that theory. Of course, Arkie’s story was so ridiculous that Mulder did believe him. To a point.

“No. I’m just saying that I think the kid is too stupid to make it up,” Mulder argued as he walked past her to get back into their car.

There was truth and facts to Mulder. There was conjecture and wavering states of what could be interpreted. The world was not black and white but many differing shades of a technicolor wheel of possibilities. It was exciting to work with but frustrating at the same time. She wondered if these conversations did more for Mulder than just get his mind working or if he found her strict science to be the wet blanket he once described it as.

From her point of view, he was too obsessive about their work and she was frustrated that he chose the mistress of the paranormal over her time and time again. He called her impossible to please and she called him selfish for only needing her when there was no one else. It didn’t help that they didn’t agree on much else except for trivial things most people had to compromise over. It wasn’t a question of chunky or smooth peanut butter or skim milk or two per cent. They went with smooth and two per cent because he conceded having sharp pieces of nuts on toast or in a sandwich wasn’t enjoyable and she could use the extra fat from the milk. Mulder didn’t like strawberry jam because of the chunks of strawberries frequently found in most jams so they compromised on raspberry. However, when it came to keeping the house at a state of cleanliness that didn’t give her orderly mind anxiety, they came to blows. Mulder was a perpetual slob and he could only make so many attempts at organizing the clutter he collected before he gave up and resented her for making him try.

That didn’t stop them from the occasional sleepover that was less reminiscent of the year they spent as lovers before his abduction. Frequently, she would come to the house with an overnight bag to go over files but sleep in the bedroom across the hall that used to be where she imagined William having a room if they ever found him.

It made them both a little crazy to cohabitate but not have the bravado to make a move past the strained limbo of post-lovers and current partners. Sometimes she felt the electricity of his desire for her so strongly but she couldn’t bring herself to make the first move back to a place that mended every wound they inflicted on each other.

Maybe she had to cut Mulder some slack. He used the wiles of being an attractive man to get what he wanted from women the way some women used their femininity to get what they wanted from men. There was no shame when a friendly waitress was engaging with a table because she did not want to sleep with her customers but appreciated a generous gratuity.

Scully was so used to getting the charming and enticing side all to herself. Law enforcement, particularly the FBI, was still mostly a boys club. When they encountered women, they were usually victims, suspects, doctors or nurses at hospitals they needed something from.

It was rare to encounter women with her credentials. More women were entering science fields but it was harder and harder to recruit a recent medical graduate and convince her to carry a gun, especially when the student loans from medical school were almost suffocating. An entry-level government salary barely covered living expenses.

Realizing that she was being territorial over Mulder without cause, Scully relaxed on their way to the hospital. He used charm and kindness to calm Little Judy down to speak to them. She wondered how he saw a connection to the case immediately through a window from some drawings that looked like strange games of Hangman.

The more they looked into Judy’s drawings, the more sinister and threatening the games seemed. As they drove to the closest diner, Mulder tasked Scully with looking for nearby motels in the area.

Two bottles of beer were set on the table while she scrolled through the Google search results. Mulder slid hers in front of her and ordered a sandwich for them to share.

“No mayo,” she reminded him as he specified the bread.

“Right, _no_ mayo. Just bring it on the side,” he confirmed with a sigh. “Uh, fries and a side salad. Whatever is your _healthiest_ dressing and put that on the side.”

Scully glanced up as he handed the waitress their menus and she caught his lingering stare towards the young woman as she walked away. She looked back down at her phone with a flush to her cheeks but this time she wasn’t feeling fluttery from a simple kiss on her hand.

“ _What_?” he questioned and took a sip of his beer.

Scully looked back down to her phone. “The closest place within the FBI budget is the St. Rachel Motel ten minutes away.”

“You know it’s funny that I can stand outside a hospital while talking about our son and tell you that you’ve never been just anything to me,” Mulder started as he ignored her information. “And you still think that I’m checking out other women as a threat to how I feel about you.”

“So you admit that you were checking out other women,” she commented and he rolled his eyes with a shake of his head.

He looked cool and collected as he draped his arm across the back of the seat and leaned against the wall of the booth. Almost too cool and she knew that if she could just get out of her own head, she could climb across that table and muss his hair up while kissing him for all he was worth. Dana Scully didn’t do such things in public so she was left with pressing her thighs together and sighing in response.

She folded her hands across the table and looked at him plainly. “And how is that?”

“You told me you needed me and I know what you said about us, Scully,” he retorted and took another sip of his drink. “You think I stop feeling how I do because we’re in some fucked up limbo of our own making?"

The waitress returned with their meal and Mulder gave her a tight smile of gratitude. She took the hint and left immediately.

He put a dollop of ketchup on the edge of the plate and slathered the mayo onto his half of the toasted sandwich.

“Mulder… your _cholesterol_ ,” she chided as she put on half the dressing provided for her salad.

He took a french fry and scraped off some of the mayo and held it up between two fingers. “You know this tastes _good_.”

“Fat tastes _amazing_ ,” she agreed. “Doesn’t mean I want to eat it and die of a heart attack.”

They paused as they thought of Scully’s deceased mother. Her funeral had been a time they had taken solace in each other. Maggie held a special place in Mulder’s heart too and he had been Scully’s rock throughout her grieving process and after the funeral. He had held her while she cried, made her forget her name with his touch and allowed her to return to work sooner than any person would deem acceptable. He could have very well ordered her to take a week to mourn as per the FBI’s regulations but he sidestepped that protocol so she could distract herself with the case.

“I think you have a much healthier diet than both of your parents did,” Mulder noted as he shook the french fry side to side. "They ate lard out of the can, didn't they? This is a whole other level. It's practically a salad."

Scully’s eyes were drawn to the oil and egg combination on top of the deep fried potato. When she broke it down in her mind by ingredients and process, it sounded awful and distasteful that she didn't want it. As it was for so many things, she could talk herself out of the pleasures of the flesh just as easily.

Just as she could talk herself out of it, she could be easily swayed into it. It was how she found herself in bed with Mulder time and time again. In a bed, on the couch, on a table, in the kitchen or behind a desk… It was all semantics.

As soon as he began to retract his offer, Scully leaned across the narrow table and took a bite of the deep fried potato strip from his fingers. She revelled in the crunch of the food she forbid in her diet and the almost sweetness to the mayonnaise. Just like Mulder, she would have some regrets for the infraction but she could get over it.

“Tease,” he chided her and popped the rest of the fry in his mouth.

“Eat your food,” she ordered and he shook his head with a laugh.

Hopefully the St. Rachel Motel would have rooms on opposite sides of the parking lot.

They finished their meal and Mulder paid the bill with his company card, handing the receipt to Scully before she could remind him. Little changes in Mulder like that gave her hope there was a future for them outside of their work. He thanked the waitress on the way out and held the door for Scully to exit into the cold Virginia night air.

Scully had to remind herself how lonely and needy Mulder could be. He would isolate himself so far in his paranoia but then latch on to the first person who he felt he could trust.

He probably didn’t push her to make a commitment because their lines of who they were to each other weren’t in black and white. Three weeks ago after fighting against duplicitous independent contractors working with Titanpoint, they found it to be a catalyst to another encounter. They spent an hour pushing their wet bodies against one another under the powerful stream of water in their old master suite shower until he finally shuddered and finished inside of her. Since then, they had suffered a strange limbo of unspoken desires and longing.

It wasn’t the same as it was in the beginning. When they first began their romantic interlude, they couldn’t satisfy their cravings for each other enough. For anyone to assume their meetings to appease their desires of the flesh happened few and far between would be incorrect. She wondered if she had developed an addiction to him sexually or him to her. Or was it just so satisfying to finally be able to express the urges they had both suppressed for too long?

After Mulder had tried to kiss her in the hallway outside his apartment, she felt a yearning from him that she was experiencing now. It was a mix of frustration, anger, fear and desire. For her, the fear was that it was a chance missed or an opportunity that wouldn’t arise again to move their relationship into the next stage. Now, it felt like a chance they kept ruining for themselves.

It wasn’t just her holding back. He told her quite frankly after she was discharged from the hospital and cleared for duty that he found her distracting sometimes to the point of almost being annoying. He left her in the office to contemplate that notion while he delivered a report to Skinner’s office. When he returned, they argued about the lack of clarity to their relationship. They needed each other, they wanted to protect each other but they couldn’t function as partners and live together. Something had to give and eventually it would. Until then, she kept her guard up for a signal from him that he was ready to try again and be consistent versus the erratic and less than rational man who had all but driven her from their home.

Mulder’s eagerness to share a space when the St. Rachel Motel manager offered them one unit was worrisome to her. The motel was not unlike many they had visited in the past when circumstances forced them to share a space. In those instances, they had the luck of a king sized bed or two beds to a room or pure exhaustion to take sex out of the equation. Mulder had been yawning but she was well aware of his stamina and endurance after long days.

The hotel clerk caught a look on Scully’s face and reassured her there was a pull out. Thank God for the sisterhood.

“I’m _just_ trying to get some shut eye,” he muttered as the woman walked away.

Scully nodded. “I’m glad to hear it.”

Sometimes her own lies sounded true to her but she could feel Mulder’s gaze on her as she walked in to sign for the room. There was a deep desperation fighting to ignore her hormones as he approached to put the company card down on the desk.

They opened the door to their suite and Mulder looked around the small living room.

“Quaint,” he noted and set his bag down on the dining table in the living room. Mulder pulled the cushions off the seat of the couch and looked at the hopeful bed. “Cozy.”

Scully gave him a look as she walked past him and into the small bedroom. Even if she had considered sharing the bed with Mulder before, the queen sized bed would be too cozy for the both of them. He took up far too much space and she couldn’t sleep next to him with the feelings in her belly pushing her to act upon them.

“Mulder do you want to shower first?” Scully asked as she set her bag on the bed and began unpacking her things.

“Is there only one bathroom here?” he asked as he entered the bedroom as he was loosening his tie. “That’s the opposite of convenient.”

“It is weird,” she commented.

Mulder peeked inside her bathroom. “There’s two doors… oh I see. I’m back in my room.”

“Are you going to shower first?” she repeated.

Mulder entered her bedroom again with three buttons undone on his shirt. “Do you mind? I feel like I can see the smell coming off my skin.”

She stepped towards him a little and gave him a whiff. He mostly smelled of his deodorant, aftershave and his own sweet smell. It bothered her that she appreciated even his sweat.

“You’re fine,” she commented and cleared her throat.

“It’s ripe under here,” he assured her and she waved her hand for him to utilize the shower.

She could hear the sound of the shower as it turned on and steam began to float out from the bathroom into her bedroom. She walked into his area of the suite as a shirtless Mulder was undoing his pants and she saw him standing in the second doorway.

“Sorry,” she conceded quickly and turned around.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before,” he reminded her and there was a clink and a thud as his pants hit the floor.

The door clicked shut and she walked back to her bed to sit down. He was probably next to naked now and she tried to ignore what was going on in her mind. This was reminiscent of so many years before they consummated their relationship when she had to cool her hormones within the quiet of a hot bath with a washcloth in her mouth to muffle her sounds.

Scully scratched her nails up her thighs and then pressed the pointed tips into her palms. She was a rational person with control over her constitution. She wouldn’t fall prey to her hormones that fluctuated between wanting to kill Mulder for glancing at other women to sitting on his face when he was kind to her.

Mulder exited in a towel with his clothes in one large palm and his abdominal muscles flexing as he ran a hand through his hair with the other.

“All yours,” he said as he walked through the adjoining door into his living room.

Would it have killed him to put on some underwear? she thought with obvious frustration. Or a shirt?

Scully shut her bedroom door and undressed slowly to have a shower as well. She carefully hung her suits and tucked the one she was wearing at the back of the rack before utilizing the shower. She scrubbed the day off her skin with a fresh bar of soap while keeping her hands away from every part of her that wanted to be touched. If she gave in to them in the shower, she might be heard or found by Mulder. Lord knows the man liked to burst into rooms at inopportune times.

She would have to wait and contain her feelings. She was a professional and she had the control to maintain these urges elsewhere.

When she stepped out of the shower and pulled a bottle of lotion from her toiletry bag, a neatly wrapped tampon fell to the floor. Scully tucked the towel tighter around her body and wondered if she packed this knowing it was coming or if she had missed her period.

She walked across the bedroom to retrieve her phone and opened her calendar for this month. She scrolled past to the previous month to see four X’s for the week previous…. She was late.

If she had been fifteen years younger, she might consider that pregnancy was a possibility but this wasn’t that. While she was still enjoying an infrequent sex life, at her age, conception was even less likely than when it happened the first time. As a doctor she knew it could be symptoms of premenopause but it stung, even more, to think of that after today’s events. The gas station attendant that flirted with Mulder, a man twice her age, and the waitress who he gave a longing look to.

Scully put her phone on her bedside table and walked calmly towards the bathroom to finish getting herself ready for bed. She sprayed the dry shampoo through her hair and brushed her locks before donning a pair of black, silky pyjamas.

She looked down at the material as the buttons slipped through the eyelets to fasten the shirt closed. The ticking of the clock on the wall beat in unison to her own heart.

Mulder knocked on her door one last time as she was approaching the bed and he entered as she was reaching for it. The familiarity threw her off.

“Hey, I’m just hitting the hay,” he said as he pointed over his shoulder.

Scully let out a slow breath. “I’ll see you in the morning, Mulder.”

He gave her a look she couldn’t quite decipher and then grinned briefly. “Good night.”

The door swung closed and she could hear the groan of the pull-out couch springs as he laid down on it.

“Ninth run for the Yankees!” the television blared through the wall and she could hear him restlessly trying to find some sleep through the white noise of the crowd cheering.

_What was she waiting for to be happy? Would the world have to end before she realized there was time missed with Mulder?_

She had the sinking thought that waiting for her might not be what he wanted anymore. A younger woman could satisfy the basic biological need for a man to spread his genes and pass on his name. Females were typically categorized as wanting a family whereas males had the desire to expand their DNA among as many able-bodied women as possible.

In previous years, Mulder worried he was holding Scully back from a chance at motherhood and happiness. Scully now worried she was keeping them from moving forward with their lives because of their infrequent dabbles into the pleasures of the flesh.

It was now after midnight and nothing could be solved tonight. She would have to sleep and hope that her desires would tamper in the morning after a solid nights rest. 


	2. Chapter 2

Sleep was restless for her that night. The sheets were too starched and the room had a faint smell of pine needles. It wasn’t soothing for rest, regardless of how tired she was when she finally climbed into bed. She had willed her body to a calm state and tried not to think about the case.

She was on the edge of REM sleep and her body fought to wake up while something sinister was lurking in the distance. If she slept on her emotions, she could wake up refreshed for tomorrow. Maybe she would have a better handle on how she felt herself teetering from anger to lust with Mulder.

It was unlike her but premenopause could do that to a woman. She tried not to think of herself as old now that she was fifty. It wasn’t as though she needed a cane. She could handle herself in a fight and except for glasses to read, she had her faculties in order.

Her mind was fighting as she turned in her bed and suddenly she opened her eyes as she felt a presence in the room.

“ _Mulder_!” she scorned him quietly. “What are you doing?”

“That bed nice and comfy?” he asked with a waggle of his eyebrows.

No, he was not coming in here for that. She couldn’t think why it would be wrong to invite him into her bed right now but mostly, she was tired. She was tired of classifying what they did together as wrong in her mind because her heart knew it was right.

“Mulder, go back to sleep,” she pleaded tiredly as she moved her hands down her torso.

“I wish that I could, Scully,” he started and she wondered if she was about to hear a monologue about why they needed to sort out their awkward relationship in the middle of the night. “They just found Arkie Seavers dead in his jail cell.”

That woke her up. She propped herself up on her elbows and closed her eyes. She was too tired for this and she knew it meant she would have to do an autopsy in the morning to confirm a cause of death.

“Was there any indication of foul play?” she asked as she threw the covers off her legs.

Mulder nodded. “I already told them you were going to do the slicing and dicing.”

She used to feel annoyed when he made her schedule for her or volunteered her for an autopsy without asking. Now, she came to expect it. Twice since they arrived back on the X-Files, he had arranged someone else to do it and she felt stung by his choice for a week.

“Sure,” she agreed. “In the morning?”

“That remains to be seen,” he called as he left her bedroom to get ready.

She dressed in a black scoop neck and leather jacket with her suit pants and met Mulder outside at the car. He was dressed in his suit from earlier that day, minus the tie.

Sometimes she wondered if it would be easier to work with Mulder if she wasn’t attracted to him or if it would make it more difficult. When she had been trying to earn his trust and he was trying to convince her he wasn’t totally nuts, there wasn’t time to feel as constantly distracted by the slight crush she developed on him and was actively trying to ignore.

“Feels just like old times,” he commented as they approached the SUV outside the hotel. “Waking you up in the middle of the night, you looking cute and sleepy in your PJs… All we missed out on was a few curse words.”

“You?” she asked.

Mulder laughed. “No,  _you_.”

Scully paused before opening her door. “I didn’t-”

“You might not have thought I could hear you but I remember some pretty colourful words coming out of that Catholic-raised, quite proper mouth of yours,” he rejoined with a slight laugh. “My favourite was when you called me a grey alien hunting, seed spitting  _asshat_. Asshat was my favourite thing you've ever called me that you didn't think I could hear, by the way. Very clever.”

She felt her cheeks pink. “I didn’t realize you heard that.”

Mulder opened his door and climbed into the drivers seat. She eventually got over her shock and climbed in.

“I think we had been up for thirty-six hours and I had asked you to do yet another autopsy…” he commented as he put the key in the ignition. “I didn’t begrudge the comment. I liked that saltier side of you.”

“ _Liked_?” she repeated as she fastened her seatbelt.

Mulder shrugged and looked over the steering wheel into the distance as he turned the ignition. “I suppose the dirty words still do something for me but the response-”

He paused as he contemplated how he was going to finish his sentence and she watched his lips turn up into a slight grin.

“What?” she prompted him.

“I guess the response is the same,” he said with a chuckle and glanced over to her. “I mean…. respectfully but it’s kind of a turn on.”

Scully laughed. “ _Oh_.”

If Mulder were any other man, she would have exited the car and reported him to Skinner, however, their coloured history didn’t quite put her in a position where she felt like he was overstepping with those comments. When he eagerly took the one room from the hotel clerk, she was more unnerved since they had been in a strange point of limbo with their relationship. Sharing a small room would only magnify that.

“Sorry,” he said with a shrug.

Scully waved her hand. “It’s a far cry from Tailhook and I don’t exactly feel like you’ve overstepped a boundary.”

Mulder pursed his lips as he put the car in drive. “Okay… well, let’s go see Arkie.”

They drove to the county jail where the young man had hung himself. Arkie’s lawyer was livid. Dean Cavalier yelled at anyone who would listen while insisting that his client wasn’t suicidal. Granted, the young man didn’t appear to be a danger to himself or others when they interviewed him but the method in which he died was common for suicides among detainees. It was why protocol insisted upon the removal of belts, shoelaces and any other garments that could be used for self-strangulation.

Arkie Seavers was just a young man who indulged in escapism techniques of drugs and alcohol but that could very well be part of the typical right of passage into adulthood often taken by his generation. Scully thought back to some wild nights with Melissa’s friends and arriving home with more than just one alcoholic substance in her system. She couldn’t exactly judge his methods of distraction from the unpleasantries of life. It was more the norm among young society to take part in such frivolity.

“Arkie didn’t want to  _die_ ,” the slick lawyer insisted as though Mulder and Scully were another jury to be convinced while they stood by the lifeless body of a man who insisted he saw his dopplegänger. “This is an outrage! Who is going to stop this carnage?”

“We’re working on it,” Scully assured him.

“Someone has got to pay,” Cavalier announced with his hands on his hips and she wondered if his passion was over the loss of a client or the payday he could receive from suing the Henrico County Police Department for wrongful death. “Arkie did not want to die.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Mulder,” Scully said as Cavalier stormed off. She hated that the sleep she needed was scratching at her vocal chords.

“Yeah, anyone for a game of hangman?” Mulder quipped dryly.

“It’s just a  _coincidence_ ,” she insisted. “Judy said she didn’t even know Arkie Seavers.”

“Not necessarily, Scully,” Mulder retorted in that familiar tone that meant he was about to launch another theory.

“Well, she said she didn’t know him,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, but she said that she,” Mulder said as he pointed to the distance. “ _Might_.”

“She also said she was playing  _telepathically_  with her brother,” she retorted with a look that should have ended the conversation.

“Our suspect number two,” he rejoined and she fought the urge to roll her eyes at this theory.

By now, she should have known that he would be on the right path to finding the truth of the likelihood of events. Mulder was quick to jump to something outlandish and landed someplace in outrageous while he then looked at her to validate the journey through science.

_Hey, Scully! You should be able to prove with little evidence and all your science that this guy really did teleport because there’s a scratch on the floor where he was just standing._

Inevitably, his theory panned out and she was left to scramble to find out how the hell someone did it while he looked like the genius for seeing the paranormal, connecting the dots quickly and making leaps of faith through unlikely angles.

When they were leaving the jail, Mulder got the number for a local car rental from one of the deputies and they drove back to the motel to try to get some sleep. If she had an autopsy to do in the morning, she needed more than the little sleep she had.

When she arrived back at the motel, she gave Mulder a lazy wave and collapsed back onto the bed. She heard him begin to snore from the open doorway before she could settle into deep sleep.

***** *** *****

The morning came too soon and Scully left for the morgue before Mulder awoke. She left him the number to the local cab company to get him to the car rental office and ate breakfast at a diner around the corner before heading in. Space was definitely needed for her to survive this trip until she could find the sanctuary of her apartment.

It took less than the usual time to see that the cause of death was in fact strangulation but it was hard to determine if Arkie died at his own hands. He had some trace materials from the belt under his fingernails but also some abrasions on his hands from where he could have been pulling on the buckle. Nevertheless, if Arkie died by his own hand or at the hand of another, it was indeterminate.

The autopsy was inconclusive due to the manner in which he died and Scully’s report would reflect that. She needed to try to look beyond the science and try to find answers through their supposed suspects.

Since Mulder was going to ask Judy’s brother Chucky some questions about their telepathic games and finding Arkie in his cell, Scully decided to go back to the hospital to interview Judy on her own.

When she arrived, two nurses on duty warned Scully that the Judy she was going to encounter was not the Judy she met with Mulder the day before. This side of Judy’s personality was dark, deep, sinister and took pleasure at throwing food the same colour as fecal matter. Anyone who chose Dookie chocolate pudding for the hospital meal plan had a strange sense of humour.

It wasn’t the first time she would encounter such a patient with these symptoms and probably wouldn’t be her last. Her training taught her when dealing with a split personality to be authoritative and emit a parental force over the mischievous and prickish actions.

“Both parents hanged themselves,” one of the nurses told Scully before she was going in.

Immediately, Scully’s brain tucked away that piece of information for later.

She reached for the door and hesitated a beat. “And you’ll come in with me?”

“Not a chance,” they laughed.

So much for the support of the sisterhood, she thought to herself as she entered the room.

It was dark and she could hear Demon Judy cackling in the corner to herself. The walls of her room were lined with hangman games but she couldn’t quite make out any of the names to bring up in her line of questioning.

“Judy, it’s Agent Scully,” she announced herself.

She could hear the food flying through the air and she stepped sideways as it hit the wall beyond her, three feet to the right.

“I want you to behave yourself,” Scully ordered as though she was speaking to a rambunctious child.

“I know what you want, bitch,” the dark personality sneered from her chair.

The room smelled like stale food and the rotting pudding on the walls where she had flung it at hospital staff to deter them from interrupting her state of psychosis. Often, a childhood trauma could create the split personality such as the death of Judy’s parents however, the game of hangman lead Scully to believe it could be linked to the dopplegänger killer that Arkie had claimed were after him.

“I want to know about Arkie,” she requested.

“Reached the end of his rope!” Demon Judy declared before throwing another spoonful of food across the room.

Scully stepped sideways to avoid another lob of the chocolate pudding. “I’m not afraid of you, Judy.”

“Yes you are,” she sneered from the dark corner where Scully could see three other cans of the pudding on the window ledge. Judy had a busy morning. “Everybody is afraid of sweet Little Judy.”

“Is Little Judy a killer?” Scully asked as she took a haphazard step closer.

“Little Judy is an angel,” Demon Judy spoke softly as she leaned forward.

Being aware of the alternate personality and its actions were common among those suffering from this kind of dissociative identity disorder.

“And what about your brother?” she returned. “Is he involved?”

“Could be,” Judy said nonchalantly. “Chucky Poundstone is the devil’s dimwitted disciple.”

Now they were getting somewhere. Scully wondered if the dissociative identity disorder was selective to Judy or her brother had it too. Hopefully, Mulder was having more success with Chucky than Scully was with Judy.

“Did he kill Arkie Seavers?” Scully questioned.

“Arkie Seavers killed himself,” Judy stated firmly as she slouched into the back of the chair.

“And how did you know that, Judy, unless you were involved yourself?” Scully countered.

She could feel Judy begin to shift her mood slightly. From twisted to something more sinister, Scully struck a nerve and Judy was about to snap.

“Are you trying to trick me, Agent Scully?” Judy asked as she leaned on her elbows toward her.

She could barely make out the lines of Judy’s face but she could see the sneer.

“I want the killing to  _stop_ ,” Scully replied authoritatively.

“Oh,” Judy scoffed. “Well don’t you have a  _heart of gold_. What’s he see in you, your handsome partner? One  _taste_  of Little Judy and he’d forget you even exist. Maybe… I can make you go away too.”

“Are you threatening me?” Scully clarified.

Another spoonful of food flung past her and Judy cackled maniacally. “Afraid I’m gonna dirty your cheap little ensemble? You’re nothing but a hosebag! How old are you? Forties? Past your childbearing years. You’re all  _dried up_! Not even half of a woman.”

This was nothing Scully hadn’t thought to herself over the last few weeks and acutely, over the last two days. It doesn’t hurt when someone on the outside agrees with the worst thoughts you have about yourself. The wound is already open and throbbing. Maybe if she was forced to witness Mulder chasing after some young woman or overhear him tell someone else that he wanted more kids but never had the chance, she might feel the pangs of her barren womb again. She would feel that was her fault and that emotion took up too much space in their relationship as it was.

“You can’t hurt me, Judy,” Scully said as she began to head towards the door.

The woman in front of her couldn’t change Mulder’s circumstance with children and a family life. Whatever she was saying was unkind but Judy wasn’t a spring chicken either. She wasn’t saying these words from a place of power and ability.

“Nothing hurts like the  _truth_ ,” the woman sneered from her chair.

Scully pulled the door closed shut behind her and a smack of pudding hit the window. It was the most accurate shot Judy had.

She had to meet Mulder to discuss their recent findings and take a shower. He mentioned something about dinner but she was desperate to wash off the words slung at her along with the foul-smelling confection in a can. There was something about standing amongst the stench of dried pudding that made her feel like it was seeping off the walls and into her hair.

As she drove back to the motel, Mulder sent her a text he was getting beer and asked if she needed anything. Scully pulled off to the side of the road to tell him to eat if he was hungry before getting back on the highway to finish her journey.

She wasn’t sure how far away he was but with the lack of sleep she got the previous night and the day weighing on her, Scully went to the bathroom to ready herself for bed. Mulder could drink alone or get take out and maybe she would wake up long enough to throw some food in her mouth and go back to sleep.

As she stood in front of the mirror and studied her face, she could recognize the lines that had appeared in the recent years. Scully once contemplated if she might have avoided these signs of aging if she chose a different man to live with or if she was destined to live a life fretting about the future with someone who chose to jump onto moving trains in pursuit of the truth.

A knock on her bedroom door sounded and she paused undressing. She redid the last button she had unfastened and tried to get her mind back into the case. Mulder would want to theorize and use her as a sounding board as she debriefed him on what she learned from Judy.

Mulder took up the doorway from the bedroom to the living room with his muscular frame. He had obviously started to undress as well with the top three buttons open and his tie sitting on the table behind him next to the pack of beer he picked up.

“What did you find out, Scully?” he asked.

“That Dookie flinging past your head sends a sharp message to your brain,” she summarized as she moved back towards the bed to take out her earrings.

“What message is that?” he inquired with a hint of humour underlying his deep voice.

“To gather the other apes and make war on your dreaded enemy,” she quipped.

“I believe I’m in touch with that feeling, Scully,” Mulder acknowledged as he nodded.

She tossed her hair over her shoulder as she looked back at him and spotted the bottle of beer between his long fingers. “Did you have Dookie flung at you too?”

“Uhhhh, figuratively,” Mulder began as he sat on the edge of her dresser. “By the queerest little man in the queerest little house.”

“I don’t know Mulder,” she countered as she sat on the neatly made bed. “This Judy… she has some malign influence over these victims and I’m at a loss to figure out what it is.”

In the beginning, admitting ‘I don’t know’ to him would send them down avenues of research and reference books that piled high on desks next to cold take out. After years of working together, it usually prompted Mulder’s eidetic memory and Scully’s blanket knowledge of science to somehow play out a theory they could both be happy with.

He walked in to every case with a theory already brewing in his mind. He liked to get a jump on everything except for housework and his bills. The man was too busy trying to stop an alien invasion to pick up his socks and move them from next to the laundry hamper into the bin with the other dirty clothes. He left empty sunflower shells on surfaces and thought coasters were irrelevant. It would be endearing if it wasn’t so annoying. He just had to figure out the why and how the world did the things it did. These were the kinds of cases that proved both their sides of the argument. They witnessed something outrageous that defied logic that she could eventually see through a microscope to prove the validity of their work. These were the kind of cases that made those small annoyances worthwhile.

“I agree there is some evil in the air, Scully,” Mulder replied with a nod.

“No, it’s not evil,” she countered as she shot down his theory that a supernatural force could be behind it. She saw his face express his distaste with her argument. “It’s mental illness. It’s some kind of psychic transference.”

Mulder shook his head. “I wouldn’t rule out ghosts.”

She steadied herself and felt her vocal chords strain. “Except for the fact that they don’t exist?”

“Of  _course_  there are ghosts,” he said ironically.

“Science has proven that stimulation of the brain’s left anterior insula is linked to the feeling of a sense or presence,” she explained. “And, that repeated stimulation to an area of the left temporal parietal junction is what promotes the sense of a shadowy figure collectively known as Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome.”

Mulder narrowed his eyes at her as he hiccuped slightly. “Talk about flinging dookie.”

She shifted on the bed and let out a sigh as the words began to tumble out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Mulder, do you think of me as old?”

“ _What_?” he asked as he moved from his place on the edge of the dresser to sit on the bed with her. “Where is that coming from? Maybe in dog years, but no. What are you talking about?”

The embarrassment of confessing her fears of her age immediately stung her cheeks with a pink hue and she glanced down to the line on his left finger where the ring she put on him was now glaringly noticeable. It was the indentation of a ring he wore more than not and her thumb itched as she played with the spot the ring he gave her was now absent from. She had to assume that he wore his ring in the privacy of his home as she did in hers when the loneliness of their separation felt too much to bear.

“A woman thinks about these things,” she explained casually.

“No, Scully. You still got it going on,” he complimented her and chuckled. “You still got some  _scoot_  in your boot.”

This was dangerous territory. A compliment like that always led to tangled limbs on top of surfaces like the mattress under their backsides. An image of her skirt wrapped around her waist with his pants barely at his ankles while he pumped into her furiously flashed in her mind. Immediately, she worried he could see the thought in her eyes and she pushed on his arm.

“I’ll boot you out of here,” she said as she moved him off the bed.

Mulder gave her a familiar leer over his shoulder as he walked back to his part of the room. She couldn’t help but grin as she closed the door.

“Knock three times,” Mulder called as the latch caught in the doorway.

Scully leaned against the door for a brief moment. If this was a year into their working relationship, she would have written off the comment as his usual innuendo. This was slightly different since they had continually failed to survive as a couple while they couldn’t manage to stop sleeping together.

 

***** *** *****

 

It was an early morning for both of them when the sound of a large truck on the side of the highway pumped its airbrakes and woke them up before six a.m.

Scully could hear Mulder swearing at the window as she contemplated an attempt to sleep another twenty minutes or to just get up. Mulder was now making too much noise for her to sleep at all. Eventually, she would have to get up and delve deeper in the dark minds of Chucky and Judy Poundstone. She had submitted a request for their family records. They had been sealed when Charles “Chucky” Poundstone began working for the county jail. That alone should have caused red flags to pop up all over the place but somehow this small town ignored it for a guard who never arrived late, worked overtime without complaining and was otherwise the model employee.

The other side of a model employee such as Chucky was that he could be hiding something sinister. It wasn’t always the ones you suspect that can commit the darkest and deepest of crimes. Monsters that lived inside of humanity could lash out at those who were innocent or unsuspecting of the macabre acts inflicted upon them.

“I might go out there and hit a guy but that would mean I can’t interview Chucky Poundstone this morning before he goes into work,” Mulder said as he walked into the bathroom from his secondary door off the living room.

Both doors shut just in time for the echo of his morning pee to hit the bowl. She decided to get up and make the coffee instead of listening to him groan as he emptied his bladder.

The television was left on overnight with the sound on low and she shut the screen off before crossing the small space to fill the coffee maker in the sink off of the living room.

Mulder exited with a toothbrush in his mouth and a slight scowl on his face. He was less than chipper in the mornings when he didn’t get more than six hours of sleep. She had the sneaking suspicion from three empty beers by the sink that he stayed up much later than she did.

“I’m making coffee,” she informed him as she filled up the pot.

He nodded and headed back to the bathroom. Scully set the coffee to brew and crossed back into the bedroom. She stood in the doorway of the bathroom and folded her arms under her breasts.

“What?” he asked after he spit the toothpaste into the sink then cleaned the remnants from the porcelain.

“I need to use the bathroom too,” she pointed out. Mulder rinsed off his toothbrush and exited the small room quickly. “Thank you.”

“I’ll fix you a coffee,” he offered and she closed the door on him. “Half a Splenda?”

“Just a little cream,” she called as she sat down. “I’m cutting out that other stuff.”

As she was washing her hands, she decided to use the shower first and bump Mulder from the line. As she finished rinsing her hair and shut the faucet off for the shower, she could hear the television through the door from her room. The white threadbare towel didn’t exactly provide a lot of cover and she rebuked herself for not anticipating to bring a housecoat on this trip.

Mulder was holding both coffee mugs in his hands and sitting in his underwear with a focused expression while CNN reported the latest on the president.

“This guy-” Mulder started and took a sip of his black coffee. “I’m surprised some gun-toting fan hasn’t offed him yet.”

“That’s not something you can repeat at work, you realize that don’t you?” she asked him as she approached.

With her right hand over her left breast to hold the towel in place, she retrieved her coffee from Mulder’s hand before he spilt it on her bed.

“Thank you,” she said quietly as she took the mug from him and tendrils of her wet hair dripped onto the carpet at her feet. “I think you have to be revolutionary for the greater good to be assassinated. Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr… they were all here to make us better-”

“ _Jesus_ , Scully,” Mulder scolded her as he stood up from the bed. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

She looked down at her frame in the towel as he put his coffee mug down on the dresser with a little too much force and the liquid splashed on the wood. He stepped back from her and put a hand across his groin as he took in the sight of her. She could feel her cheeks reddening at each beat that passed between them.

“You’re in  _my_  room,” she pointed out eventually.

“Well… you’re  _naked_ ,” he said and brushed past her to the bathroom.

“You said it yourself, nothing you haven’t seen before,” she called after him and took a sip of her coffee. “Don’t be a hypocrite.”

Mulder paused as he was closing the door. “It’s not the same and you know it. No one wants to see  _this_  in any form of undress.”

“I think we’ve had two days of women half your age hitting on you to disprove that theory,” she muttered as she set her cup down and opened the drawer to pull out her undergarments for the day. “Hurry up. I can’t get dressed until I blow dry my hair and the only plug near a mirror is in there.”

“You’re a  _tease_ ,” he scolded her and shut the door. She could hear his boxer shorts dropping to the floor and the sound of his hand moving across his flesh. “A god damned  _tease_.”

Scully opened the lotion bottle and began to lather her skin with the intense cream while she tried not to listen if Mulder was doing anything about the slight tenting she spotted in his shorts before he stormed into the bathroom.

When he exited the shower fifteen minutes later with his boxers in hand and a towel around his waist, she decided he probably did do something about it. The first clue was that he walked past her doorway without glancing in her direction. He closed the door on her room and she laid back on the bed as she tried to will her sex to stop throbbing.

This was going to be a long day.

 

***** *** *****

 

Scully was somehow ready for the day before Mulder and left a note under his door to meet her at the motel office. She had to ask about another room for them because this was becoming unbearable.

As she waited for another customer to finish up, she watched as Mulder exited their room and head towards her.

“Can I help you?” the office manager asked. This morning she was wearing a name tag that said Dolores.

“I just wanted to know if you had any other rooms come available?” she asked and tried to clear her throat. “For me or my partner.”

“I told him last night I wouldn’t have anything available until Friday,” Dolores replied.

“I guess we need to work on our communication skills,” Scully muttered under her breath and the woman gave her a sympathetic smile. “Okay, thank you.”

“I did tell him if I had another early check out I would give him a call,” Dolores replied. “I just don’t see that happening.”

Scully nodded and left the office to find Mulder standing between their cars looking cool and detached.

“Breakfast, Scully? I could go for some eggs and other cholesterol threatening foods.”

She crossed her arms and gave him a disapproving look but her stomach rumbled loudly to discredit her argument. “ _Try_  to eat some egg whites, Mulder.”

“What if I have two yolks and four whites?” he bartered as he opened her car door for her. "Compromise?"

She sighed. “Sure. Are you going to follow me there? We can split up after breakfast?”

“That was my plan, G-woman,” he affirmed as she climbed in.

She put her key in the ignition as Mulder disappeared around the white SUV. She adjusted the rearview mirror on her vehicle and turned the key. When she glanced over at him in his car, he was looking at her with a longing she recognized and she looked away quickly out of fear of exposing how she felt. This was becoming too much. If she didn’t get a room away from Mulder soon or solve the case and escape back to the tranquillity of her D.C. apartment, she might crack.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Scully walked out of the hospital with the placebo bread pills that Judy gave her in the pocket of her suit jacket. The fact that two nurses trained in science believed that the bread pills Judy Poundstone made out of her breakfast toast could somehow protect them from the strange game she played with her brother was unsettling, to say the least.

She had witnessed people dying at the hands of others through psychic transference. If she could nip it in the bud, she could somehow stop what was happening. It was hard to argue with a woman who claimed to play hangman via telepathy with her twin brother.

Mental illness in a person or a shared psychosis in twins couldn’t influence another to commit suicide. Scully knew that much from everything science taught her. Psychic transference was a stretch but she was willing to go with that theory above the presence of a ghost or evil.

Before she could take the pills to the lab to determine if there were actually any special properties in them, Mulder called her to tell her that Arkie’s lawyer, Dean Cavalier, wanted to see them. She could only imagine what lawsuit he had dreamt up since they saw him as they stood over Arkie’s bruised yet lifeless body.

“He seemed a little _hot_ under the collar,” Mulder reported.

“I hope he hasn’t figured out some way to make us complicit in Arkie’s death,” Scully commented as she approached her vehicle.

He sighed heavily into the phone. She could picture him sitting in the driveway of Chucky’s strange house as he contemplated the case as she was doing outside the quaint hospital of Henrico County.

“I don’t think there was a way for us to prevent the death of Arkie Seavers, Scully,” he countered. She could hear his engine turn over in his car and crows calling out in the distance. “We didn’t ask them to move him into a different holding cell. Henrico County would be on the hook for every single misstep in protocol.”

Scully turned her engine on and looked around the area. “You’ve obviously had the same thought as I did.”

“And I did my due diligence to double check _we_ weren’t at risk,” he replied.

“Just like the motel room,” she muttered and immediately regretted it.

Picking a fight wouldn’t help their situation.

“What?” he asked. “What are you talking about? The motel room?”

“The front desk officer informed me that you’d inquired about a second room,” she told him and he exhaled a mild groan. “Didn’t you?”

“After this morning, can you _blame_ me?” he rejoined.

It might have been the same reason but Mulder’s inquiry happened prior to their morning run in. Maybe his back wasn’t happy with the pull-out couch. Assuming the worst of each other only moved them backwards.

“No…” she admitted slowly.

She could hear him shift in the driver’s seat as he spit out another seed out his window. “You know conflict elicits stress and our self-defense mechanism against harmful elements in our world while it tells us two things: we’ve been hurt or we’re about to be hurt. We take these things very seriously, we jump into action mode and release adrenaline, cortisol and react impulsively. If we think we are about to hurt, we feel sick and it kicks us into action. We experience anticipation, anxiety and the stress of long-term effects of what the future might bring because we don’t want to be hurt.”

“What are you suggesting?” she asked him.

“That when I asked about the second room, I was trying to prevent more stress,” he explained and the sound of a sunflower shell echoed through to her ear. There was a pause as his tongue removed the husk from the seed and he spit the shell onto the road. “I read your JAMAs. I know that adrenaline and cortisol aren’t the best hormones to be released into your system while also investigating a case that involves evil forces.”

“Mulder-” she began but her train of thought took a turn. “I think we need to call a truce.”

The phone was silent. She worried he would argue back that none of the way things were going were his fault. It was an indication that she was feeling guilty for the way she was acting and reacting to Mulder. It wasn’t his fault that her hormones were all over the map and she was feeling less than solid in the limbo of their separation without divorce. The home Mulder lived in was still considered to be hers and she liked spending time there until it became obvious they had too much underlying strife to continue on as they were.

“Truce. I mean about sharing a room. We can fight about whether you think there’s a ghost or not because we _know_ I’m right and there is.”

“I’m hanging up now,” she announced and he chuckled. “Where did Dean Cavalier want us to meet him?”

“Back at the motel,” Mulder replied. “See you there. Drive safe. Watch for doppelgängers in your backseat.”

Scully was about to hang up and pulled the phone back to her ear. “ _Why_ would you say that?”

Mulder chuckled and she hit the end button before he could respond. It was like he took pleasure in getting a rise out of her and teasing her to her limits. He never made her feel bad when he joked around and usually, the teasing that was over the line was directed at taboo subjects and not her own faults.

As she drove towards the motel, Scully realized that the ways in which Mulder teased her over the years hadn’t matured as they had in their bodies. He could be childish at times with certain things he knew she was secure or insecure about. Joking about an evil doppelgänger in the backseat of her car wasn’t really something she could appreciate with a lighthearted laugh. Not right now, anyway.

This whole case had them on edge for varying reasons. If she rationalized everything in her mind, she could see that it was all mostly psychosomatic instances of sweeping suicides among large groups of people with no known cause. This could very well be it but lives were being lost and she felt powerless to stop it.

Helplessness in this kind of scenario only made her feel more vulnerable and lonely. Those two emotions made bad bedfellows.

When she arrived at the motel, she could see Dean Cavalier frantically approaching her car from his sporty two-door. He pulled her door open before she could turn off the engine.

“Agent Scully!” he said as he knocked on her window. “I saw him!”

She stepped out of the car to close her door while Mulder approached from across the lot. “Hold your horses, Mr. Cavalier.”

“And he looked _just_ like me,” Cavalier insisted as he pushed Scully’s door closed.

“Just calm down and you can tell us both what it is that happened,” she asked as Mulder walked up slowly.

“All right. I saw through a window the same way that Arkie said he saw his double,” Cavalier insisted.

“Was it the first time?” Mulder asked as he removed his sunglasses.

“No, I think I saw him the other day, staring at me from a bus stop,” Cavalier remembered. He was still frantic as he waved his hands at them.

“You’re only making it worse,” she commented.

“What do you mean I’m making it worse?” Cavalier spat back. “This guy is _stalking_ me!”

“Your paranoia is only going to feed on itself,” she advised him. “You know that mass hysteria is just a symptom of fears run wild.”

“Those people all _died_ ,” the slick lawyer reminded them frantically.

“Well, I do agree with Agent Scully’s theory that there is a danger and you should take precaution against it,” Mulder piped up.

That seemed to calm Cavalier slightly. “All right. What should I do?”

Mulder struggled for a beat and caught the look in her eye. “Stay off the interstate?”

Cavalier sighed loudly as that option was less than helpful.

“Do you have a family, Mr. Cavalier?” Scully asked but she assumed the answer was no.

“No I don’t,” he answered as if he could procure one as an asset for this kind of situation. She imagined that a wife and child wouldn’t fit into the sleek lines that Cavalier appreciated in his life. A baby seat wouldn’t work in his sports car. “I live by myself.”

“Okay well maybe, stay home,” she suggested. “Take some time off work. Lock your doors and call the police if you have another panic attack.”

“Yeah,” Cavalier scoffed as he pointed his finger at her. “That’s easy for you to say!”

“Take my card,” Mulder offered and he took the small card stock to Cavalier.

The card was snatched reluctantly from Mulder’s fingers with little else as his alternative. Standing outside in the quiet of pre-twilight, Mulder gave the parking lot a once over.

“Like I said, clearly there is a dark influence set loose in this town, Scully,” Mulder declared as he turned to face her. He was licking the extra salt from the sunflower seeds off his lips and she suddenly had the taste on her own tongue.

“Again, by dark influence, I _presume_ you mean evil, Mulder,” Scully summarized. “But there is no such thing as evil. Evil is a _concept_ , like the devil!”

“Oh, the devil is a concept?” Mulder asked as he removed a bag from the passenger seat of his vehicle. “ _Clearly_ that’s not what they taught young Dana Katherine Scully in Sunday school, is it?”

Scully had removed her purse from the car as well and closed her door before approaching Mulder in the middle. How metaphorical. “Well, I certainly believed in the _literal_ devil when I was a child.”

She lied then. She thought some part of the devil lived inside of Donnie Pfaster too but that was neither here nor there now. That demon was dead.

“You don’t believe that we as humans have dark sides?” he began to propose. “That we sublimate or repress?”

“ _Anyone_ with an imagination can entertain acting out violent or anti-social behaviour. That doesn’t mean that there is an _evil_ twin lurking inside of us,” she countered.

“Speak for yourself, Scully,” he replied with a wink she wasn’t sure was a conscious decision on his part. “Tell that to Chuck and Judy.”

“Chuck and Judy are mentally ill, Mulder,” she almost pleaded for him to see the reasoning.

“Explain how they’re doing it,” he challenged lightly.

“I can’t explain it,” she answered.

She couldn’t explain how Robert Modell was able to influence those around him even with the science of his tumour staring them in the face and Mulder holding a gun to his head. There was no science in the thought-o-graphs that Gerald Schnauze created but somehow she ended up in one before he abducted her too. There was no explanation for the connection from Father Joe to the young men he once abused and their current crimes. In some way, they all occurred and she had to link it all together but in the end, her reports would read to anyone else as science fiction.

“But if you eliminate the impossible, whatever is remaining even if improbable must be the truth,” she quoted his own words back to him.

Mulder grinned a little. “No shit, Sherlock.”

He clicked the remote on his car and she wondered how she could quantify the connection from two murderous twins to the mass phenomenon of these suicides. What sick and twisted pleasures did they get from watching others die around them when life was so precious?

“I have to admit, I still sleep with my back to the door,” she started and tapped the button on her own remote. “Just in case the devil does come in the night.”

She left Mulder standing between their cars but she heard him say to himself, “You can never be too careful.”

She used her electronic card to open her room - it was one of the few modern upgrades that the motel had made over the years aside from the microwaves and digital boxes for the thermostats. Mulder entered the room just behind her and she passed through the living room towards her bedroom.

“Are you hungry?” she asked him as she undid the buttons of her suit.

Mulder loosened his tie and hung his jacket across the chair at the small table. He looked at her with a crooked grin and a flash in his eyes of something else. “I could eat.”

“You can do the googling,” she said as she shed her jacket. “No diners. Something higher than two stars on Yelp.”

“Your sense of adventure is _abysmal_ , Scully,” he scorned jokingly as he started to undo his suit shirt and pulled his phone from his pocket to search for three choices.

He would present his findings with a little backstory on each establishment and then she would make the final choice. It was part of their routine when dining in a strange place since the usage of cell phones took the crap shoot out of picking a place from the phonebook or the take out menu roulette.

Mulder knocked lightly as she was pulling her jeans over her hips and he gave a cursory glance before averting his eyes playfully. “I found something.”

“Only one?” she asked as she pulled on the same leather jacket she had on the day before.

She pulled her hair from the collar and tugged the edge of her shirt down that had ridden up her stomach. Mulder’s eyes were glued to his phone and there was a mild sense of relief he had not caught that. He had also put on jeans with a T-shirt and a black bomber jacket overtop. Casually dressed Mulder was a favoured look now that she saw him so frequently in a suit.

“Yeah, there’s one place that’s a step between fine dining and thin fork establishments,” Mulder said as he scrolled through something on his phone. “Those are my words, not theirs. Nothing ethnic, authentic or interesting to be fun with.”

A self-deprecating joke about her own lack of allure due to her age and declining appeal was on the tip of her tongue but she didn’t want to bring that up again. He must have seen something on her face because he cocked his head to the side in that way that reminded her of a puppy trying to decipher if the promise of a walk was real or not.

“What?” he asked.

Scully shook her head. “I’ll tell you later.”

Mulder nodded once and held his hand out to lead her to the door. The comfort of his palm at her lower back was reassuring like a kiss on the forehead. Nothing could change that there were small tidbits of who they used to be in their partnership before things were messy and confusing.

Mulder unlocked his car as they exited the room and opened her door for her. “M’lady?”

She grinned at him and held up the case file as she approached. “We’re still doing some work. Don’t get _too_ relaxed.”

“Chivalry ain’t dead, Scully,” Mulder said as she climbed into the vehicle. “And I’m here to prove it.”

Mulder trotted around the car and climbed on to his seat.

“You actually _are_ a gentleman,” she commented and felt silly for complimenting him on something that he probably never concerned himself with. When she looked up at his face he was grinning like an idiot. “What?”

“Two compliments in three days, not related to how well I-”

“ _Mulder_ ,” she cut him off, knowing very well what he was about to say and he laughed quietly. “Aside from reading that adult video news article in the office, you’ve never called me a derogatory name or made me feel like I wasn’t a valuable member of the team.”

“You save a woman’s life from Antarctica and twenty years later she _finally_ sees how you need her around,” he muttered as though he was breaking the fourth wall to speak to an audience. Scully pushed on his arm. “I wasn’t doing it just so I could perform CPR and make up for that _fucking bee_.”

Scully felt her cheeks pink at the idea of Mulder’s desire for her then and she thought about the times when he wanted her regularly. She shifted in the car and glanced towards the backseat. Once upon a time in another life together, this was similar to another vehicle that Mulder had pressed her body into the bench in the back with steam giving them cover from eyes outside. She wasn’t prepared for times like these when she would feel the ghosts of passionate trysts past haunting her mind and occupying her body the way he used to fill her body with his. He was intrusive, a little painful at first and so welcomed once there was a slight adjustment - much was the same with their partnership.

“So, where are you taking me?” she asked as he turned on the SUV.

“Scully, you’re not going to believe this,” he started as he put the car in reverse. “But it’s called The Sauce and Toss-”

She cut him off with a groan.

“Lobster, soft shell crab, crawfish and mussels,” Mulder said with a waggle of his eyebrows.

“It sounds like bibs and indigestion,” she muttered as she pulled her phone from her pocket to google the location. “ _Mulder_ , they sell pop by the bottle.”

He grinned. “Scully… we’re going to wear _bibs_. We’re going to get our fingers on some meat and butter on our faces.”

She knew there was nothing eloquent or uptight about a seafood shack that was one step up from a thin fork establishment. They sold food by the bucket and had a giant shark on the wall. If she listed those things off, it would sound like she was whining but in all honesty, he could have tried a little harder to find a nicer place.

“They sell wine,” Mulder coerced as he shifted the car into drive.

“I’m sold,” she declared with a wave of her hands.

“Finally,” he laughed as he gave a cursory glance past her and pulled onto the highway.

 

***** *** *****

 

Thin fishing nets hung from the ceiling and white round bulbs hung from a black rope as though it was lighting the rails of a ship. Shiny, polished picnic tables were in substitution of proper table and chairs with paper wrapping around each top for easy clean up.

The food was served in plastic baskets with parchment paper lining and the smell of the grease from the deep fryer with the underlying scent of ocean fresh fish filled her nostrils. The place was packed for a Wednesday night, which she took as a good sign of the quality of food.

A hostess approached the front stand and grinned at them. “Hiya!”

“Hi. Table for two please,” Mulder said holding up two fingers and putting his hands in his jacket pockets.

The young woman smiled at them politely and looked down the list and then over her shoulder for an empty table. “Sure thing, come on in.”

“We’re featuring our halibut and caesar salad tonight for $13 dollars,” the hostess informed them as they stepped over the bench to sit down. “The fifty piece wing basket is on special for two dollars off.”

Mulder looked at Scully in awe. “ _Fifty_ piece?”

“Mulder, _no_ …” she denied him as she worried about his heart health and his face fell. He looked amazing with or without his clothes on but he had to take care of his insides too. “Get a starter size if you have to.”

“Deal but you have to try at least _one_ of them,” he bartered.

Scully shook her head and looked up at the hostess who was watching them with an adoring grin. “He’s a bad influence.”

“I can tell,” she replied with a laugh. “Enjoy your meal!”

“Thank you,” Mulder replied and studied the flavours of wings. “I want to try this ‘Supahotfire’ but I don’t want to hear ‘I told you so’ later when I complain I’ve got heartburn.”

“Then get the medium buffalo and I won’t say a word,” she advised him quietly as she looked over her menu.

It was a laminated card stock, double sided with seven sections, including the drinks. At the bottom of the menu, it offered delivery and online ordering. When Scully and Mulder first began working together, finding places in small hamlets like Henrico County was tough to get a delivery to their motel room. Scully preferred to eat over a table in a restaurant versus in their motel rooms where the smells of whatever food Mulder had dared to try that night lingered among his space. Spicy foods always smelled the worst the morning after but somehow Mulder was immune to such odours.

The man would make a fuss at the sounds and smells of an autopsy being performed but could withstand the moulding food of lunch two days prior. She couldn’t imagine how Mulder managed not to get food poisoning or gut rot more often for the way in which he used to ignore all food safety measures and common sense with his poor habits before she nagged him into changing.

Mulder must have caught the look on her face and he wrapped two digits around her index finger. “What?”

Scully looked up from the menu. “I just was recalling how often I nagged you when we first started working together. What a wonderful element of our partnership that was.”

“ _Nagging_?” he repeated and Scully nodded, enjoying the feeling of his hand still lazily holding hers. “About what?”

“Food, for one,” she reminded him. “When I got back from Maine and we were going over some case notes, I found orange juice in your fridge from _1994_.”

"Oh my god!" Mulder laughed. “That tasted awful!”

“You _drank_ that?” she asked him and he nodded through his laughter. “Why would you…. Why not throw it out?”

“I mean… I grew up with a housekeeper and even at Oxford, we weren’t expected to do anything so I don’t know how my parents expected me to survive in the real world without someone pestering me to know better,” he reasoned sheepishly. “I think until you came along, it didn’t occur to me that I might get sick or that it mattered if I did… I never had a friend that _cared_ like that.”

_Why did he have to say things that tugged on her heart in such a way?_

She looped three more fingers into his and gave his hand a squeeze. “I… I mean, that’s what friends are for…”

He grinned at her. “I know you only did it because I named you as my doctor on that form during our first year together. You had that _ethical_ Hippocratic Oath not to let me die from dysentery.”

Scully nodded and looked back down to her menu but kept her fingers tangled with his. “Sure, _that’s_ it.”

As if on cue, a young man approached their table in a crisp blue shirt that matched the decor and an apron that was barely holding on to its clean front. “Hey folks, how are we doing on this lovely evening?”

“Great, thank you,” Scully replied and gave him a polite smile. “How are you?”

“Busy as a beaver,” their waiter replied with the same cheerful tone that probably assisted in a higher gratuity. “Do we have any questions about the menu at all? Do we want to start off with anything hot or cold to drink?”

“That’s an _interesting_ way of asking us if we want a beverage,” Mulder commented.

“If you ask folks if they ‘want a drink’ they assume bar beverage and I’ve had to adjust my turn of phrase to ensure I prevent confusion,” he answered with a wink at Scully. “Then they reply, ‘oh just water’ which is a drink but due to the constraints of this job, you can’t sarcastically ask how they’re going to ingest it.”

His name tag read Tommy but he was in his late twenties, which in her opinion was too old to be called a child’s name. Billy, Jimmy, Tommy, Donny, Kenny or Johnny were fine as children but once a man shaved daily, Scully felt that names like that should shift into something more mature. She could feel the thought in her eyes and Mulder gave her a forced smile. Sometimes she wasn’t sure which one of them was in the other’s mind but maybe he had just heard her comment on it enough times that when they did meet adult men with the names of children, he could assume what she was thinking.

“I’d like some wine, I think,” Scully told him as she picked up the triangle drink menu off the table next to the bottle of ketchup and plastic salt and pepper shakers. “A nine ounce of the pinot grigio.”

“That one goes well with everything we have here,” Tommy commented as he wrote down her order. “I’ve done _extensive_ research. And for you sir?”

“You got beer on tap?” Mulder asked as he looked towards the bar where waiters and waitresses were lined up to use the point-of-sale computers at either end.

“Lager, pale ale, IPA?” Tommy offered.

“I’ll take a lager,” Mulder asked. “Pint if you got it.”

Tommy wrote it down. “A couple of waters, too?”

Mulder nodded and they placed their order. When Tommy left the table with their menus tucked under his arm, Scully reluctantly pulled her fingers from Mulder’s to take the file out of the tote.

“Don’t spoil this with that,” he whispered.

She looked at him questioningly. “If we don’t work, one of us is buying dinner.”

Mulder patted his jacket pocket. “I got a wallet. I could buy you dinner.”

She thought about previous times when he had picked up the tab if they were out of town on a case. She knew it was Mulder setting the scene for a date. He picked up the tab, gave a few slyly placed compliments through dinner and left her breathless with his kisses before they got into the car.

“But-”

“Not for that,” he interjected quickly. “I mean… I know you’re not…. we’re not there but I can still buy my friend dinner.”

Scully closed her tote and set it at her feet. “Sure.”

It frustrated her that she came off so cold towards him. After all the time they spent together, the fact that he could be hesitant to cross a barrier with her made her question so much about them.

Tommy brought their drinks to the table, a basket of wings, a stack of napkins and wet naps. “Your dinner shouldn’t be too long. Is there anything else I can get you folks right now?”

Mulder shook his head. “You okay?”

Scully nodded and took a sip of her wine. It was sweet, light and fruity which was surprising for a small place like this. By now, she shouldn’t assume that a place such as this with such a busy clientele wouldn’t provide good service, food or drink.

Mulder took a sip of his beer. “Mmm, good. Want to try it?”

Scully glanced at the edge of the foamy beer and took the tall glass from him. It was rare that she had a beer these days but she always liked what Mulder picked out.

“It is good,” she assured him as she wiped the foam from her lip.

She eyed the buffalo wings between them and decided she would refrain if she was going to have all the other deep fried things Mulder had coerced her into ordering.

“When do you think you’ll stop perpetually being on a weird food kick?” Mulder asked as he picked up another wing.

Scully gave him a less than patient look. “Mulder.”

He waved the half-eaten wing in front of her and she took another sip of her wine. “Fat tastes good, _remember?_ ”

“A lot of things taste good-”

“I _know_ ,” he interjected and she tucked her chin back. “I mean…”

She shook her head. “Do you talk like this to _every_ woman?”

Mulder scoffed. “What is ‘ _every?’_ I know you, the lady at my dry cleaners and the manager at the grocery store who rolls her eyes at me when somehow I crash the self-checkout machines by scanning lettuce.”

“So that’s a no,” she replied.

“I’m not as much of a ladies man as you think I am,” he confessed with a grin and took another sip of his beer. “I like watching you squirm a little.”

Scully sighed. “Mulder…”

“It’s all fun, right?” he asked. “Or am I going to get strung up like those guys we all knew were slimy, shady and disgusting?”

Mulder was referring to the current political climate of the entertainment industry and she tilted her head to the side in disappointment.

“You’re not them,” she assured him and he gave a dramatic wipe of his brow. “But sometimes I can’t tell what’s a joke and what’s serious.”

“I’m sure there’s some truth in every joke, Scully,” he said and picked up another wing.

He pulled off one end of the joint, wrapped his mouth around the small piece and ate the meat, leaving the cartilage and the other end piece. As he chewed on his appetizer, she realized that feeling uptight around Mulder wasn’t changing anything except for causing more issues of miscommunication between them.

Deciding to commit to one or two wings before they were gone, Scully copied Mulder’s method at eating the chicken wing with little mess. She pulled off the end and stuck the meat in her mouth. As she dragged her teeth along the bones to remove the food, Mulder’s face showed pure delight.

She tossed the empty bones into the basket where Mulder had discarded his and licked the sauce off the pad of her thumb.

“I mean… that’s way hotter than when I do it,” he said with a shake of his head as he picked up his glass. “You get a gorgeous woman eating any food she’s said she’s not supposed to for whatever reason, something messy and men react in a very specific way.”

“If you’re good, I’ll sit on the hood of your car in that ridiculous thing you bought me and eat a Hardee’s Thickburger for your birthday,” Scully commented quietly and Mulder coughed on his beer.

As he was wiping the bubbles from his shirt, he shook his head at her. “You’re a fucking tease.”

“You gotta learn to take as well as you give, Mulder,” she admonished him playfully and he raised his eyebrows. “The teasing.”

“Of course that’s what you meant,” he replied with a shake of his head. “Maybe you should be buying me dinner.”

“I’m putting on the show,” she countered as she picked up another wing and repeated the method of eating it clean.

“I’ll fucking say,” he muttered and took a long sip of his beer.


	4. Chapter 4

There was no passionate kiss at the car that left Scully breathless after their overt flirtations through dinner. They ate their crab legs with the glistening of the butter on their lips, shared a spicy lobster tail and a crab salad roll. They watched each other’s mouths frequently from appetizers to dessert as tongues cleaned off the sauce from their meal choices. Scully ordered a second glass of wine while Mulder drank a decaf coffee and they had a quiet conversation with safe topics that excluded everything about their past and situations of sexual nature.

Mulder could wax poetic about any topic, monologue on almost anything he had read about once and listened to her discuss the finer points of specific science that was beyond his reach. It made it easy to be with Mulder because she never felt forced to fill the silence and yet it was easy to sit without words being exchanged because at least they were together.

When they arrived back at the motel, Mulder didn’t ask her to share another beer with him or to watch a game on the television. He sat on the end of his bed with the sports highlights playing as she changed into her night clothes. She decided not to overthink what it meant when he kept his eyes glued to the television as she walked within his peripheral vision to close her door.

She left the connecting door to his space slightly ajar and looked at him one last time before turning off her light and getting into bed. The second glass of wine buzzed in her head as she pulled the stiff pillow under her head. The scent of pine needles filled her nostrils again and the underlying bleach on her fresh sheets.

The glow of the streetlights and motel sign shone through the threadbare curtain and she adjusted her back on the hard mattress that was less than forgiving. Time away from home only made her long for the pillow top comfort of the bed she and Mulder picked out after they purchased the ordinary house. It was the kind of mattress that had enough bounce for certain activities but would allow her to remain undisturbed when Mulder came to bed late. Her mattress at the apartment was similar in almost every way except she put more pillows on that bed to mimic the presence of another body and subtract from the loneliness of living alone.

She couldn’t make those distractions there without Mulder, the midnight interloper, seeing the pillows next to her and asking her why. He crossed so many boundaries in her personal life, it only made sense he wouldn’t ignore that.

Of course, Chucky and Judy wouldn’t allow her to have a solid night’s rest as their game of sadistic hangman took another victim. Dean Cavalier was beheaded in his living room with every door locked from the inside and the blood splatter clearly indicating that it was not done by his own hand.

They dressed slowly in the suits they had on that night and Mulder spoke on the phone to the local police on his way out there.

“We’re not staying out all night. You guys do a little legwork for us after we get a preliminary feel for the scene and we can try to knock this out in the morning,” he said with authority. “Yeah. I’ll see you in a few.”

The area outside of Richmond that they were staying in was so small that they were at the deceased’s home in a matter of minutes.

“Do we know how Dean Cavalier would have gotten into Chuck and Judy’s periphery?” Scully asked as she folded her hands in her lap.

Mulder turned onto Cavalier’s street where a crowd had formed. “The article in the paper where he accused the Sheriff’s department of misconduct might have caught Chuck’s eye but it doesn’t list anyone specifically as a suspect. It was mostly just Cavalier grandstanding.”

“Chuck and Judy Poundstone are not the first case of twins to commit crimes together, Mulder,” Scully began as he pulled up to the house where an officer waved them into a parking spot. “While none of the crimes were related to the psychic transference of will onto another…. This is not the first case of homicide by fraternal or identical twins. Pete and Pat Bondurant in 1991, Tasmiya and Jasmiyah Whitehead in 2010, Reggie and Ronnie Kray in the 1950s as well as the Murphy twins in 2016…”

“What is your point?” he asked.

“None of the investigators linked these twins to a source of evil,” she answered. “Mental illness is obviously a factor here with Chuck and Judy but I don’t know how that could cause these victims to see their doppelgängers. I don’t believe that a doppelgänger could manifest into a physical form and cause fatal harm to another.”

Mulder grinned at her. “I know you don’t believe it Scully but is it possible?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” she muttered and opened her car door.

Scully spoke to the first officer on the scene while Mulder took a few photos of the inside of the modern home of the slickest lawyer in town. It was definitely a home he had decorated himself. Nothing about the space screamed that a feminine touch had been applied to any surface or item except for the level of cleanliness that smelled like a professional job. He probably had a daily housekeeper come by to do any laundry, dishes and tidy up around him.

Mulder would be that kind of man to need a daily housekeeper but he also chose to spend his money quite strangely. She preferred that he became the kind of man who learned to take care of himself versus the constant man-child effect that came out of his privileged upbringing.

“So, neighbours called police when they spotted him behaving strangely,” Scully told Mulder as she approached the macabre scene. She folded her arms across her breasts and shivered as the cool night air invaded Cavalier’s regulated temperature home. “He was dumping firearms in the driveway.”

“I take it the doors were locked from the inside when they arrived?” Mulder asked as a way to set up his theory to prove that an evil presence was the culprit and not the victim himself.

“Yeah, when he wasn’t responding, they looked through the window,” Scully described as she pointed to the window by the front door and Mulder followed her gaze. “And they broke in the door.”

“Has anybody offered up any evidence for how this could have happened,” he queried as he walked around Cavalier’s body past the pool of blood from his headless form.

Scully uncrossed her arms and took in more of the crime scene. “Well, it seems everyone is under the agreement that a man can’t cut off his own head.”

“Oh,” Mulder commented as he pointed in her direction. “Good to see there’s still a shred of sanity left in this town.”

“But for the record,” she began with a hand raised as though she was under oath. “I have to say it’s not outside the realm of extreme possibility.”

“Oh so he just tripped and fell,” Mulder described as he walked past the pile of swords and Cavalier’s decapitated head. “And splattered the walls with blood?”

“Well, if he were a determined man,” she theorized as she knelt down at the body. “With a razor-sharp sword set on creating his own self-fulfilling prophecy-

“He was scared out of his mind, Scully,” Mulder interjected with his hands on his hips.

Scully reached a latex-gloved hand into Cavalier’s pressed pants pocket and pulled out Mulder’s card. “Well, if he was in his right mind, he might have called you.”

She presented the card to Mulder as though it was proof enough that Mulder’s theory had some holes in it also.

“Oh,” Mulder quipped as he leaned down to look closer at what she was holding. “Maybe he tried, only he lost his head.”

He winked at her before walking out of the crime scene area and she remained crouched at Cavalier’s side as she contemplated how she could have saved this man.

Scully exited the house with a feeling of something lingering on her person. She had that sensation before when standing among Jerry Schnauze, Donnie Pfaster and other monsters that hid behind the mask of regular men.

She looked past the police line and beyond the red and blue bubble lights from each fleet car. She felt the eeriness of something lurking in the vicinity and eyes watching her.

A woman with her exact likeness was standing just thirty feet away. A man pushed through the crowd to maneuver around her while the cold eyes of her doppelgänger remained focused on Scully’s face.

As she was about to move away from the door of the SUV, a group of people walked past the fence. When they were gone, the doppelgänger was nowhere to be seen and no one in the crowd seemed bothered by her sudden absence.

“You coming, Scully?” Mulder asked through the crack of his car door to her over the windshield. Scully opened her door and he closed his. “Did you see something?”

She wasn’t sure what she could tell him without sounding crazy. She wasn’t sure if it meant she was marked for death too or she was paranoid that something was coming for her. Scully had told Judy that she wanted the killings and the games of hangman to stop - perhaps that’s why their parents became a target.

Motive was never too complicated for murder. Whether it was love, lust, lucre or loathing, there were a number of specific reasons divided amongst those four generalities of why any person could take another life. Mulder believed that Chuck and Judy seemed to have a personal vendetta against each victim and some force of evil inside of them was committing these crimes in new and creative ways each time.

These reasons weighed on her mind as she changed back into her pyjamas and climbed back into her bed. It was hard to sleep with the idea of another self out there who could appear and take your life.

Scully wondered if Chuck and Judy were actually born as quadruplets but they had lost a brother and sister in the womb. Maybe there was a chimaera effect happening inside of them and two of the four babies had absorbed into the surviving fetuses before birth. Her mind was trying to absorb what could have happened to Delila and Harold Poundstone before their suicides in 1982. None of it made sense when Scully read through the preliminary file. Too much had been redacted to protect Judy and Chuck, who were minors when their parents died.

Fear was creeping into her mind and disturbing her sleep. In her dream, the woman from the crime scene was watching her as she slept. There was a knife in her hand and suddenly the doppelgänger was lifting her arm to swing the blade towards her.

Scully’s eyes opened and she turned quickly in the bed. Her heart was racing and the fear inside of her was too unsettling. The possibility that she could be a victim of the crime they were investigating had not been an issue in some time and it reminded her why she didn’t like these kinds of cases. She feared for her and Mulder now and she pushed the blankets off her legs. She needed to see him.

The sound of her bare feet on the carpet must have awoken his sleep and he turned over in bed. She looked at him with an apologetic expression mixed with fret.

“Oh, speak of the devil,” he greeted sleepily as he tried to shift his hips in the bed to lay on his back.

“I can’t sleep, Mulder,” she confessed as he propped himself up on his side.

“What’s the problem?” he asked as he pushed his fingers towards the hair that was spiking up in all different directions.

She sighed heavily. “Something about this case is getting under my skin.”

Anxiety after midnight was not her friend. She used to have moments of anxiety during her pregnancy when she was alone and the postpartum months when William would spit up in the night and she felt sleep was a distant friend. She dealt with an overwhelming dread while they ran from the authorities and hid their identities by taking under the table, cash jobs until she hid him on a property they chose because of the crawl space big enough for him to hide in. Now, she had the anxiety of these murders that seemed irrationally chosen and so random that they could be next. It was a real danger she wasn’t prepared for.

Mulder pursed his bottom lip. “Well, we’ve had stranger cases, Scully.”

The words escaped her lips before she could think a second time about the request.

“Can you hold me?” she asked.

It was vulnerability and fear that motivated her to walk into his room that night. He responded with obvious surprise but a warm welcome.

“Yeah,” he agreed with wonder and pulled the blankets up so she could nestle into the warm cocoon of his space. “I can do that.”

He allowed her to lay on his bottom right arm as his left wrapped around her body with the sheets and comforter to envelop her in a safety net of familiarity that only he could provide.

His body was pressed completely against her back from his strong chest down to his pelvis, where she could feel the bulge in his underwear rest against her backside. She was feeling the weight of the world on her. She was overwhelmed by their future together. Did they have one since they tried and failed to make it work as a couple after his exoneration from the FBI? It worked so well until it didn’t and then they were in a stalemate of unknowns. They worked in every element as a couple except when they were all together. How could anyone look to the future not knowing what the biggest part of their life would bring - the love they had for another that could someday be unrequited?

“What’s going to happen?” she asked when she felt confident that her voice wouldn’t betray just how vulnerable she was feeling then.

She could feel Mulder’s nose against her hair as he was laying behind her. “What’s going to happen, when?”

“When we’re old,” she queried.

“What do you mean  _when_?” Mulder jested with a voice as thick as gravel and soothing to her ears.

She huffed a quiet laugh but then the reality of what was making her anxious came crashing back down around her. “Sooner or later we’re going to retire.”

“ _Oh_.”

“Are we going to spend…  _time_  together?” she inquired.

Coming into a dark room in the middle of the night with questions about the unknown was usually Mulder’s modus operandi. He pushed her at her most exhausted moments to answer some big questions and prove or disprove a theory that he needed to have an answer to right then.

“I’ll come push your wheelchair,” Mulder said into her hair. “With my wheelchair.”

She had a moment of joviality again but it was fleeting. “That’s not what I mean.”

“Oh, I’ll always be around, Scully,” he vowed assuredly. “Offering bullet-proof theories of genius that you fail to assail with your inadequate rationality.”

“And I’ll always be around to prove you wrong,” she replied but there was a frown on her lips.

“Hmm,” he grumbled.

“Promise,” she asserted and he adjusted his arm to squeeze and jostle her a little before holding her tighter. “But that’s not what I mean…”

“What do you mean?” he asked and she could hear him growing tired.

Maybe if they had a solid night’s rest in the last two days, he might be up for this conversation and ready to take on some greater existential conversations of their lives.

“What if you meet someone else?” she asked with the feeling of uncertainty of their arrangement finally bubbling out of her.

They had been too frequent to fall into bed together over the last four years that it didn’t count as a separation but they weren’t quite back together yet either.

Scully sighed. “What if you meet someone… younger, who wants to have kids?”

It felt like a poison inside of her to worry about such things. Mulder had told her in the past that the only person he ever could see himself having children with was her. They had discussed it while she worked at Our Lady of Sorrows and he took on the case for the FBI.

He asked her if she wanted more kids. She expressed she would have liked to have had another one but worried at her age - at the time she was forty-four - it would be too dangerous for her and the baby. It wasn’t unheard of but it wasn’t advised due to her cancer and the stress a baby would put on her immune system.

At the time, she asked him if he wanted to have more kids, he said that her answer was his answer and she didn’t feel a second of resentment from him over that. She never worried that he felt like he missed his chance for a family after they spoke about their lives together in that cold bed in their ordinary house. She knew what he wanted and what she wanted.

They were in such a state of unknowing these days that the insecurity of whether he could be swayed to find love with another ate at her insides like a disease. Mulder never had the chance to be a father to William because she asked him to leave when he wanted to stay. To protect them all, she put William into the arms of a family not connected to their dark pasts. As much as he had told her that she deserved to be a doctor and have a family, he had every right to something resembling normal and she took that chance away from him.

“Oh, that’s what you mean,” he replied in realization. “Our work isn’t the only reason we see each other now. I’m not looking… I wouldn’t want that. Unless you think I’m holding you back and you want to be with someone else to try to have a family-”

Her scoff cut him off. “Mulder, that’s not going to happen.”

“Don’t say it like it’s nonsense,” he said. “You could. If you want those things-”

“No, I can’t,” she affirmed. “I’m…. The first time I got pregnant was a miracle. When we went to Dr. Perry ten years ago, he told us both it would be too dangerous for me to have another one. Now would be out of the question.”

“Do you regret that we didn’t try anyway?” he asked her.

“Well…” she started thoughtfully. “I would have liked to have had another one but… we ran out of time.”

“At the risk of sounding insensitive and selfish, Scully,” Mulder began. “Do you blame me that we didn’t?”

“Aside from the fact that you were a fugitive and it would have been dangerous for those reasons to have a baby before I turned forty-four?” Scully asked and he hummed in agreement. “No, Mulder. I don’t begrudge what we did or the sacrifices we made. I wish we had looked harder for William when you had your freedom.”

“If it wasn’t going to take a miracle and you met a man who could have given you a life-” he began.

“Mulder,  _no_ ,” she cut him off. “No… I would still choose us every time. I guess… I wish it had turned out differently over the last five years.”

He kissed the back of her head and felt his body relax just slightly as though he was waiting for the opposite answer. “I guess there is some part of the world that is good. You and me together.”

There was a beat as she contemplated the weight of these statements. They were doing their usual song and dance around the obvious and she wasn’t sure what the outcome would be. It was hard to stay positive in a society that had so many problems.

“Would you…” Scully started and she felt Mulder steady himself. “Do you feel like you lost a chance at something, another future with a family because of me-”

“Scully, I’ve been marked since before my birth by my parent’s choices,” he cut her off. “My life would be destined to be involved in all of this. I only regret that I got you wrapped up in it. I don’t  _blame_  you. It’s everything else out there that has been working against us.”

“Mulder, sometimes I think the whole world is going to hell and we’re the only two people who can save it,” she confessed.

“The world is going to hell, Scully,” he confirmed. “The president is working to bring down the FBI along with it. We still have global conspiracies in the dirty underbelly of syndicates of men in power while we try to stop the sky from falling with your science of all things and my brilliant theories.”

He was quixotic in his own way. It might not make sense to other people or translate in any other language but Mulder was being romantic right then.

A thought occurred to her. She asked with uncertainty and worry, “What if we lose our jobs?”

The political climate being as it was, it worried her now that a government job wasn’t as secure as it once was. They weren’t completely inept outside of the FBI. She had left medicine a second time for this pursuit for the truth. The world of science only held her interest as long as it was utilizing it to rationalize the paranormal, prove random phenomenon told only in folktales that she witnessed with her own eyes as she and Mulder chased a monster in the dark, through the woods or ran away from men with black oil in their eyes.

“Yeah,” he replied thoughtfully. “I hadn’t thought about what I would do outside of the FBI. I know you could go back into medicine-”

“Mulder,” she cut him off. “What do we do if we’re not working together?”

“Anything we want,” he offered. “Work isn’t what is keeping us together or apart. We can do anything.”

“ _Anything_?” she asked with a slight grin as she turned in his arms to face him.

Mulder’s mouth twitched in a grin as his hand rest on her stomach. “Anything. We have nothing stopping us but ourselves.”

She moved her palms down from her belly to take his hand in hers. Mulder’s fingers interlaced with hers and his eyes glanced down to her mouth. This was the green light she had been trying to give him and see in his eyes since their last encounter. She knew how he felt about her emotionally and she finally had the confirmation from him that they were on the same page.

“What if… we suspended the past and the future for just a moment?” she proposed as his hand squeezed hers.

“I’d rather do it regardless,” he said as she moved on her side and his hand left hers to trace the lines of her hips. “That maybe you could want me anyway without our past or present getting in the way.”

“I don’t need to disregard our past… I do want you,” she told him. She felt her cheeks flush as the admission of how she had been feeling burst out of her while her fingers toyed on the hem of his tank top. “Mulder, I’ve never stopped.”

He was beaming at her now with the same delighted grin when he told her he would help her try to have a baby. It was happy, excited and hopeful for all of the wonders that were about to come.

“I had  _no_  idea,” he admitted as his face moved closer. “Is  _that_  why you were getting so frustrated with me?”

She nodded and felt her tongue on her lower lip. Mulder’s eyes flickered down to her mouth and she felt a stir of desire in her belly and need to taste him.

Mulder’s face inched towards hers. He moved his body closer but this time his half-erect member was nudging her with interest and need. It filled her with exultation to know that the possibility of a kiss could still excite him as it did her. Maybe it was because she knew what that mouth could do to her and all the places it could entice.

His lips met hers and she tasted Mulder’s minty toothpaste mixed with the underlying taste that was comfortingly and consistently him. His mouth was warm and his tongue felt soft as it slid past her teeth. His fingers dug into her hip harder and she whimpered.

Mulder pulled his face back and their eyes held a conversation of intent and consent. This was what they both needed and desired, the balm of another body to provide the release from the tension of working alongside the person who excited you the most.

She grinned and their mouths met in the middle. She thread her fingers through his hair as the kiss deepened and his hips rocked against hers. He was fully hard now and she could feel her own arousal between her thighs. Foreplay was always a prerequisite for Mulder but not always necessary.

Mulder moved them so she was underneath his body as their kisses grew more heated. She spread her legs instinctively and he moved his pelvis between the V of her thighs. He thrust once and she moaned into his mouth. His right hand moved from beside her body on the bed to palm her breast and she realized how hard her nipples were at the contact.

Her body was tingling with anticipation and he had barely touched her. As he squeezed her breast, his mouth left hers and he began kissing down her throat. He sat back on his haunches as he began slowly undoing the buttons on her shirt and she panted beneath him. Mulder opened her shirt before shedding his tank top.

She sat up and pulled her legs from beneath him as she let the nightshirt fall from her shoulders. They sat across from each other for a short beat before they met again in the middle for another kiss. His strong chest muscles stretched under the heat of his skin against her breasts and his hands moved up her bare back to hold her completely.

For the first time since they arrived in Henrico County, she felt safe. His fingers were pressing into the muscles on her back as she held his head while they kissed. Just as the urge to touch herself became overwhelming, Mulder’s hand moved down her back, under the waist of her pyjamas to squeeze her ass through her panties.

His hand cupped her further between her legs and his index finger pushed on her swollen folds. Scully rocked against his body and broke the kiss to reach between them to take his hardened flesh in her palm.

He was solid, ready for her and he groaned loudly as she stroked his cock once. It felt good to regain some control over their encounter.

It was unfortunate they were kneeling on the mattress of a pull-out couch and not something more sturdy like the king-sized bed at home. She wanted to push him onto his back and climb on top of him but wasn’t sure the legs of the bed could withstand the sudden shift in weight.

“Mulder, take your shorts off,” she whispered as she looked up into his eyes.

He stepped off the bed and watched her as he pushed his shorts down over his hips. He grinned at her a little and held his hands out as a gesture for her to do the same. Scully laid down to remove the rest of her clothing and he pulled her by her knees towards the edge of the bed.

“Oh… um Mulder-”

Before she could finish her thought, Mulder’s mouth was on her and she was letting out a long moan of desire. He pushed her knees apart further as his tongue explored her sex, moving up each lip before diving in between her folds. She was so wet she couldn’t tell the difference between the silkiness of his tongue moving against her and her own arousal. She felt swollen and ready for him but he wouldn’t do this quickly. The longer the time between sexual encounters always equated to a bigger build up with foreplay.

She didn’t know if that was to prevent things from finishing too quickly on his end or to ensure she was left satisfied. Either way, she never had any complaints. Sometimes Mulder’s fastidiousness in one area left her panting and spent, exhausted and satiated that by the time he pushed himself inside of her, she felt limp like a rag doll. Other times, Mulder let her take the reins, direct the course and allowed her to dictate their pursuits as they indulged in the pleasures of the flesh.

He could watch in revelry as she rode astride him with his jaw slack and his eyes watching everything. He could plough into her with the vigor of a doctor in the ER trying to save a life however his goals were not as altruistic. He wanted her to see stars and she often did.

It was as Mulder was pushing one long finger inside of her and crooking it slightly forward to the front wall of her womb that she came back to the moment. She cried his name loudly as she sat up on the bed as sparks shot through her body. Mulder’s mouth never faltered.

His lips were pressed into her sex as he moved his tongue in methodical and gentle circles across her clit. She felt her inner lips beginning to swell. She would come soon and it would be intense. This is how it was for them the first time back. Passionate, strong, ardent and powerful sensations as they worked each other into a frenzy of much needed release. She would not find herself wanting more, he would make sure of that.

As she felt a sudden jolt inside, her sex clenched and she felt herself coming. It was exquisite, piercing and almost agonizing in the magnitude of how powerful he could do this to her. She didn’t realize it until then but her fingers were gripped on his hair and she was grinding her wet heat into his face.

She felt every muscle tighten from up her back to down her arms and then straight to her sex. A slow and powerful release inside her of euphoria took over and he persisted with his mouth as her orgasm continued to wash over her body.

“Fu-uuuuck!” she cried as she fell back on the bed and released her hand from his hair. “Fuck… Oh… God….  _Mulder_ …”

She slowly opened her eyes to see Mulder standing up from the bed and using his undershirt to wipe her juices from his face. The look in his eyes was predatory and wanton. He was going to leave her listless and spent when he was done with her. He would make up for the last three weeks of not spending time with her and their shower sex not being as lucrative for her as he had hoped. She came twice and told him she was fine but he was persistent to make it happen a third time.

After calling her a math geek, she had come to realize that Mulder had a thing for prime numbers especially when it came to her. He could never mark her just once or twice in places hidden by strict suits and pressed shirts. When she found two marks on her abdomen once on their Caribbean getaway after his exoneration from the FBI, he pointed out three more to come to the number five. The man had strange habits fueled by an oral fixation and a need to let others know her body was his.

The marks left by his mouth were few and far between that she didn’t mind it, however, the gesture was purely caveman behaviour of pure possessiveness.  
  
As she moved away from the edge of the bed and Mulder climbed towards her, she put one hand up to stop him from getting closer.

“What?” he asked.

“Lay down,” she ordered gently.

Mulder would argue the possibility of an afterlife during a funeral but during sex, he left the contradictions at the door. He was always up for anything, into everything and happy for some kind of affection she could give him.

He happily complied when she asked him to do anything whether the request was to touch her, hold her, fuck her, put fingers inside of her or taste her. He would never deny her desires unless she was begging him to stop when he was making her writhe in ecstasy. Mulder liked to prolong that until he was sure she was spent.

Mulder put his back against the pillows and she swung her leg over his lap to straddle him. He took her head in his hands and kissed her as she aligned their sexes. She brushed the head of his cock against her folds and they locked eyes as she slowly sunk down onto him.

“God,” she breathed as her lips met his hips and she felt the sharp pangs of the intrusion of his thick member.

Mulder let out a long breath. “Fucking, Christ.”

It soothed every ache she had for him while creating another kind of twinge to ease the throbbing of her desires. Her sex was swollen and tight. As she gripped his cock, her arousal blanketed them both in a welcoming but unyielding mixture of a restricted medley. It wasn’t a love song unless there was some melange.

It took a few beats before her womb relaxed and she could move without the twinge of his size making her uncomfortable. A little-known fact about Dana Scully - she appreciated all the ways Mulder made her uneasy, off-balance and distressed. It always led to bigger payoffs, professionally, personally and sexually.

“God, you feel so good,” he breathed as she moved her hips up and down on him.

“I missed this,” she admitted as he palmed one breast and put the other to his face.

His lips wrapped around her taut nipple and he sucked on the coral peak while his hand massaged the other. It was an effort to keep her hips moving in any kind of sensical rhythm so she just tried to keep some movement.

Mulder’s mouth left her breast and she moaned in regret. “Touch yourself, Scully.”

“Oh…” she started reluctantly.

Mulder nipped on her flesh to get her attention. “Touch your clit.”

Her right hand left his shoulder to comply and she pushed the pad of her finger across her sex where the bundle of nerves were still sensitive from her last orgasm. It wouldn’t take long for her to come again but he knew that.

She twitched above him and he returned his mouth to kiss and lick her breasts. She was tender and precarious everywhere he touched. He was utilizing his mouth and hands to entice her next orgasm to work with her as she moved her middle finger across her sex to achieve another release.

Small bursts of pleasure began to emanate from her sex and spread through her body. She felt like she was on fire as he began pushing up into her while she straddled him. It was sensory overload and she could hear the springs of the mattress squeal in tandem with each thrust of their hips together.

Scully opened her eyes as the next wave washed over her. Mulder was marking her across her chest, around each breast as his mouth licked and sucked her tender flesh. Her womb ached for another release and as she wondered when it would be forthcoming, suddenly she felt it.

Ecstasy tore through her muscles like a lightning strike hitting the ground. Her body went taut and Mulder continued to pump his hips up to prolong her sensations. She couldn’t move her hips, only continue to rub her clit as he took over.

She felt her body finally go limp as the last rush of liberation imbued her. She was spent, she needed a second to regroup. Mulder kissed along her collarbone as she panted in his arms. He ran his hands up her back and somehow flipped them so she was underneath with her head at the foot of the bed. She felt the loss of him when they moved and she had a fleeting moment of sadness for being empty.

“Oh…” she whispered as his hands pulled her legs up and the backs of her knees were now over his shoulders.

He had her bent in half as he aligned their sexes and pushed into her again. He was watching her face as he pushed in so that he was buried to the hilt. It felt like he was moving her organs around as he rocked his hips against hers. Her legs were spread wide enough that she was exposed everywhere. As he swayed their bodies and her back rolled up off the bed with her ass in the air, she felt her inner lips brush against his pelvis.

“ _Oh_!” she cried out.

She clutched on to his shoulders and he began pumping hard and fast. He was slamming into her she thought he might split her in two, but her womb took every thrust and ached for more as he fucked her.

“Fuck,” he growled as he pushed his dick into her. “God, you’re so  _tight_.”

An inarticulate grunt came from the back of her throat as she tried to hold on. She was being assailed with the fervour of each strike down of his hips. He was panting above her and watching her face.

Suddenly she realized what he was doing. He was trying to get her to come again. She couldn’t. She was too tired. They hadn’t slept a night through since they arrived there and she was sore.

Like everything else in their partnership, he would push her to the brink. She wasn’t sure how he was balancing it but somehow he kept one hand beside her head and the other grabbed her ass.

She knew what he was about to do.

“Mulder-” she warned him but he wasn’t going to be dissuaded by her mild protests.

She didn't mean them anyway and they both knew that. His thumb brushed along where they were joined and moved one inch back towards her back door.

“Wait-” she started but he pushed on the ring of muscle there. “ _Oh_!”

His thumb was all the way inside her ass now and she cried out as the thick pad brushed along a familiar vein.

“Oh god. Oh my  _god_! You fucking mother  _fucker_!” she yelled as she broke apart.

She was coming hard and fast with her womb only getting wetter around him. She would say no if she hated it but they had discussed on too many occasions that it was quite the opposite. It felt good, it was a little naughty and therefore, it was right up Mulder’s alley. It wasn’t a matter of yes and no in that area. It was a matter of if and when he could insert a finger and make her quake as he shoved his tongue inside her cunt.

“There it is,” he growled and kept his thumb in place as he pumped three more times. “Fuck!”

He began shooting inside of her and she shuddered as her walls milked at his cock. This was the last one she could take. It was too much. It felt too good. She could hear her moans echoing through the bedroom.

“Oh, you  _fuck_!” she cried out again.

Mulder slowed his hips and he grunted as he pulled his thumb out. He allowed her to move her knees off his shoulders and she caught the mischievous look in his eyes.

“Don’t say it,” she warned him.

“Works  _every_  time,” he whispered against her brow. “Who knew that Dana Katherine Scully of - where the hell were you originally from, anyway?”

“Annapolis,” she muttered but he knew that. It was an old joke, not a very good one, about her scattered childhood. “Do you ask all the girls that after you’ve done that to them?”

“Scully, you’re the only one I would do that to,” he promised. “So  _Annapolis_  girls like-”

“Don’t make an alliteration joke, Mulder,” she scorned him but there was a smile on her lips. “It’s not technically that anyway.”

“It’s just fun to tease you about,” he whispered. He glanced down between them. “I’ll get a towel.”

He kissed her forehead again before pulling out of her and leaving to wash up. When he returned with a washcloth, she was holding out her hand to prevent more mess.

“At least the wet spot isn’t where we’re going to lie,” Mulder noted as she got off the bed.

As she was washing up in the bathroom, there was a knock on her door.

“Just a second,” he called and she hoped he was putting on his underwear before answering.

Scully was stuck inside the bathroom with her clothing out in Mulder’s room and no way to get to her side without being seen. As she poked her head out to see if there was a clear shot to her suitcase, she realized that they had left the curtains wide open.

“Yeah?” he said as he opened the door.

A very sleepy looking Dolores from the office was standing outside with an unamused expression. “I’m getting complaints.  _Four_  of them. You woke people up upstairs and on either side of your room.”

Mulder nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s  _two-thirty_  in the morning,” Dolores reminded him as though that was the entirety of the argument.

“We’re going to sleep now,” he promised.

Scully covered her face with her hands as she felt the embarrassment of waking up their neighbours. She might die of embarrassment if she didn’t get killed by a doppelgänger first.

The door closed and Mulder came into the bathroom where she was standing naked at the sink.

“It’s all clear,” he announced as he pointed one thumb over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m so mortified we woke up  _four_  rooms!” she cried as she pushed on his chest.

“Maybe we inspired them?” he guessed as he pulled her back into the bed. “Come on. Have a sleepover with me.”

“In here?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s actually more comfortable than it looks,” he cajoled as they made it back to the pull-out.

Scully climbed in first and Mulder laid down on his back. He pulled the white sheet up over her shoulder and she could hear him sighing but sleep overtook her immediately. He really had worn her out.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

She was finally in a deep sleep. She could smell Mulder’s skin under her nose as she breathed deeply with the blankets cocooning her. She felt her mind drift into a much needed state of sleep and she was finally started to feel like there was some peace for her weary body.

“Scully! Get up!” Mulder whispered urgently. “Get dressed.”

 _No… this wasn’t happening again tonight. No….._ She felt his absence in the bed but she refused to open her eyes. No.

“Come back to bed,” she moaned as she tried to keep her eyes closed.

She was tired. He wore her out. She needed this sleep.

“They’re coming after me!” he insisted.

Her eyes opened as she tried to figure out what he was talking about. The look on his face was panicked and he was shaking as he was changing from his bedclothes.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, not moving.

“I was looking in the mirror,” Mulder started as he buttoned his shirt and glanced back to the bathroom. “And there he was. There _I_ was. It wasn’t my reflection. It was my double!”

The one night she postponed sleep for sex and she’s being punished by a panicking Mulder and the murderous Poundstone twins. She guessed that she might have got twenty-five minutes of sleep since they climbed back into bed. This was cruel.

Scully leaned up on her elbow. “I know. I saw my double too.”

“They’re targeting us both!” he persisted.

“That’s how they operate, Mulder,” she replied calmly.

“I know how they operate!” he practically yelled as he pulled on his suit pants.

“You’re just playing into it,” she insisted.

“Spare me the pop psychology, okay?” he snapped as he haphazardly zipped up his trousers.

“Mulder, you _have to_ calm down,” she maintained.

“Scully,” he started. “Scully put a dimmer on that afterglow and get yourself to the hospital before they hang us both.”

He grabbed his gun and his jacket from the small table by the bathroom door to head out.

“Mulder they can’t hang us!” she called to him. “We can only hang ourselves if we panic.”

“How many letters in _Scully_ , Scully?” he pointed out to her before leaving through her room to his SUV.

Six letters and she had seen her doppelgänger at least once. Mulder was also six letters and they shared two in the same. Chuck and Judy were definitely looking for them.

Mulder took off before she could get her underwear on. She gathered her night clothes and put them in her room before putting her suit back on. She had the smell of him on her skin and she sprayed one shot of perfume on her neck to compete with the scent of sleep and sex.

Out in the night air of Henrico County, Scully walked to her car where she felt the same presence outside Dean Cavalier’s home. The sight of her reflection in the car window jolted her and she scanned the parking lot for her double. The feeling was there but she saw nothing. Someone was watching her, that much she was sure of. She reached into her jacket and moved her hair out of the way as she looked at the strange pills in her palm.

The least it could do would provide a placebo effect for her mind and assuage it from conclusions when she saw her double again. The best it could do would be to protect her from whatever sick game Chuck and Judy were playing with her and Mulder’s lives.

She stuffed a handful of the ‘magical’ bread pills into her mouth. They were a little chewy but stale. It was gross and unpleasant but not the worst thing she had in her mouth while on a case. The smell of the goo that covered them on Brown Mountain would not be one that she could ever forget. It didn’t turn her off of eating mushrooms entirely but she never looked at them the same.

As Scully put the car in reverse to leave the parking lot, her eyes were drawn back to the motel. A figure in the window of the room she just left caught her eye.

There she was, her own self. Standing in her suit with the same post-coitus sex hair was her scowling doppelgänger.

Scully took a wavering breath. “You’re not real. You’re in my head by some kind of psychic transference due to susceptibility from discussions with a woman locked up in a mental hospital.”

She was on the highway towards the hospital to see Judy. The roads were empty and the sky was clear but there was the same sneaking suspicion of something sinister. As she glanced in her rearview mirror, there she was.

The expression on her doppelgänger’s face was menacing and dark like she was waiting for enough letters in the game to grab the wheel and force Scully off the road.

Scully exhaled quickly as she flexed her palms on the steering wheel and kept her eyes on the road. “My rational mind knows that you are only a manifest psychic ideation, born of latent hostility.”

The doppelgänger scowled at her further as the lines on the highway disappeared under her car and she continued towards Judy.

“Maybe Mulder was right,” she confessed. “You’re evil incarnate. It’s _all_ you are.”

When she looked back in the rearview mirror, the backseat was empty. She turned in her seat to look for the figure but she was alone.

She wasn’t sure if that was effective or if she had just stalled things. A rational mind couldn’t will away a doppelgänger of evil unless something else was going on. Unless Mulder and Scully were no longer the targets.

When she arrived at the hospital, the same nurses from the day before were waiting at the mental health ward station. They were enjoying a coffee, writing notes in charts and oblivious to the evil that was taking place in Judith Poundstone’s room.

“Agent Scully,” Vickie, the brunette nurse, announced as she approached. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

“Chuck and Judy are coming after my partner and I,” Scully told them and the women stood up from their chairs. “We’ve both seen our doppelgängers tonight. This _has_ to stop.”

“We’ll come with you,” Peggy offered and patted the keys hanging from her maroon scrubs.

“Are you sure?” Scully asked the women and they glanced at each other and nodded. “Okay.”

Scully began down the hallway with the two women close behind her. A doctor in a starched white jacket passed them and gave them a questioning look but she wasn’t there to ask permission. She needed answers.

Peggy pulled the keys from her hip and put the key towards the lock on Judy’s door. Scully stood on her toes slightly as she tried to see through the small window.

Just as Scully spotted Judy’s body on the floor, a face appeared in the window. It was Judy’s double! Her eyes were wide and filled with menace as Judy bared her teeth and hissed at them through the window.

Scully, Vickie and Peggy jumped back from the window with a verbal outcry of their fear. In an attempt to regain some composure, Scully stepped forward and held up one steadying hand.

“ _Don’t go in there_!” the nurses pleaded her in unison.

Scully turned to the nurses as they showed their obvious fear and she gave them a look of warning. This wasn’t going to change how Judy and Chuck saw their victims if they continued to play into the paranoia and panic they were creating.

Slowly, Scully turned back to the door but she knew she was going to be going in there alone.

She turned the handle and pushed on the door. Vickie and Peggy gasped behind her but the door wouldn’t budge.

“Judy!” Scully called as she pushed. “ _Judy_ , open the door!”

She continued to try to force open the metal barrier between her and Judy. It was as though there was dead weight in front of it and she hoped to god her instinct was wrong.

Another few pushes and she knew that it wasn’t a body but some of Judy’s furniture shoved in front of the door to create a barrier between them.

“Judy?” Scully called as she inched into the room. As she walked around the unmade bed, there she was.

It wasn’t as macabre as the scene of Dean Cavalier’s headless corpse or the strangled result from Arkie Seavors but it was not a kind killing from which Judy Poundstone suffered. Her face was caught in an expression of shock and horror, as though she had never assumed that the creatures she and her brother’s shared psychosis created could come after herself.

“Nurses get in here!”

The door swung open and Peggy spotted the body first.

“Get Doctor Russell,” Peggy told Vickie.

Scully pulled out her phone to call Mulder but it was already ringing. She pressed the green icon on her screen and held the phone up to her ear.

“Judy Poundstone is dead,” Scully told him before he could say a word.

“Charles is gone too,” Mulder replied and there was a beat as they sat among the corpses of the Poundstone twins. “I think they turned on each other to save us.”

Scully looked at the notepad laying on the floor that Judy had been using for her final game of hangman. The small stick figure had six spaces and three letters written in the middle. C, U, L until the game obviously took a turn.

Dr. Russell entered the room and took one look at Judy’s body before she closed her eyes in relief. “Oh, _Judy_.”

Scully pulled a latex glove from her pocket and donned it quickly before picking up the notebook. “What does Chucky’s say?”

“It has Judith written underneath what looks like the start of my name,” Mulder described through the phone. “Three more letters and I would have been toast. I almost lost the fight with my doppelgänger, Scully. He was with me in this strange house. I can see the spaces in the dust where his feet were in the house that I wasn’t.”

“Mulder, it was all in your head,” she reminded him as she stood up with the book in hand.

She nodded to Dr. Russell and walked out of the hospital room to get an evidence bag. She needed to take all of the games for her report.

“Tell that to Mom and Dad,” Mulder said with the sound of paper rustling in the background.

She could picture him thumbing previous games on Arkie’s wall. She had seen the pictures of the walls inside the old Poundstone house that once was a home for a happy family of four.

“Are they in a game?” Scully asked as she returned back to the room with a bag in hand.

The forensics team would be there to photograph and collect the other games and try to connect the victims to Chuck and Judy. Their deaths were a victimless crime.

“Looks like it was probably one of the original ones,” Mulder replied quietly. “I’m going to take a few pictures and send a team out here in the morning to work with the local sheriff’s office. We can probably head back to D.C. tomorrow.”

Scully covered her mouth with the back of her hand as she fought a yawn. “Good, I’m sure the motel manager will be glad to get rid of us.”

Mulder coughed. She shouldn’t have said that.

“Um…” she said as she sealed the bag with the notebook in it. “I’ll be waiting on someone to pass off to and head back to the motel.”

“I’ll meet you there in thirty,” he replied. “I’m waiting on a patrolman to seal the scene.”

“Okay,” she announced a little too loudly and her voice was a fraction too high. “Bye.”

Scully glanced over her shoulder where one of the local officers had arrived and was studying the names on the wall.

“Officer,” Scully approached with the evidence bag. “I have what I need for my investigation. I’ll be supplying a report to your boss when I get back to D.C.”

The officer looked away from the wall to Scully and nodded slowly. “I’m glad it’s over.”

“I think this was the only outcome,” she agreed.

“Why couldn’t they have played chutes and ladders like every other kid?” he muttered as he put his hands on his hips on top of his duty belt. “We all knew Chuck was a little off but no one suspected him for _this_.”

Scully pushed her lower lip up to frown slightly and shook her head. She handed a card to the officer. “You can call our office if there are any questions regarding our report.”

She left her card with Dr. Russell and exited the hospital with a sense of relief that it was all over. Something had to stop Chuck and Judy but it was unfortunate the only way that could have ended it all was by killing each other.

The highway was quiet on the way back to the St. Rachel Motel. She took the time to reflect on what she and Mulder had done just hours ago.

Was it a mistake? Was it a human moment of emotion and hormones getting the better of her?

Scully shook her head. She wasn’t a robot and rationalizing herself away from what happened wasn’t going to help her feelings. She was a woman and the way she felt about Mulder wasn’t cut and dry. It wasn’t a sequence of ones and zeroes that lead her to the rational choice to climb into his bed. There was no impartial or prudent decisions when it came to sex with Mulder.

It only scared her how much she missed it and how much it meant to her. What if it didn’t mean the same to him? They discussed the future, they discussed the past but what about right now? They were both holding out being with other people while they muddled through their own issues with each other.

For her, there would only be him and for him… he declared it was just her that held his heart. The question remained, how long could she trust that promise?

Was it love?

Inside her soul at the base of who she was, she knew she cared for him and was in love with him but the rational mind wanted more than just the instinct and emotion. Forgiveness in her heart and the assurance that they couldn’t get torn apart by the worst versions of themselves again was needed more. It hurt so much the last time she said goodbye to him and took too long to realize she was punishing herself for not sticking by him when he needed her most.

They broke vows. They betrayed themselves and each other. They hurt with words, neglect and apathy. Somehow they found the courage to try again during a moment of weakness with hormones that couldn’t be tampered down. She realized on [that rainy afternoon](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4283631/chapters/27372243) in her apartment with her heels on and nothing else that she wasn’t ready to stop loving him. She just wasn’t ready to forgive him either.

The motel room was quiet when she arrived back. She thought about a shower first but maybe that could wait for the morning.

Mulder entered as she was gathering her files and the evidence they had collected. These would be scanned, documented and digitized for the Bureau’s records while Mulder kept the hardcopies for nostalgia purposes.

Mulder looked dishevelled in all the ways she appreciated on him. His stubble was evident, his shirt was undone and he looked a little dusty from his fight with his doppelgänger. He smelled like his sweat and a little like the sex they had with his coat slung over his arm. It was a good musk.

“So I was thinking maybe we could get a couple of hours in before checkout time?” Mulder proposed.

Scully gave him a doubting look that asked a hundred questions with just her eyebrows furrowing, her eyes narrowing and her mouth forming a frown.

Mulder laughed at the insinuation. “I’m just talking about getting some shut-eye.”

If she did take some time to sleep, she didn’t want any more interruptions by being woken up with a frightful entrance.

“I’m glad to hear that, Mulder,” she replied as she continued to pack her briefcase.

“Yeah,” he agreed and looked towards the doorway to his space. “Uh, I guess I should hit the hay.”

“Okay,” she replied as she handled the files.

It was difficult to remain so impartial when she could feel her face shiny and glowing from the euphoria of their sex. The phantom pangs of how he had her bent over in the bed made her hips twitch but she tried to keep a straight poker face.

“Yeah…” he began. “But if you need anything, you just, uh, call me.”

That wasn’t a blatant invitation to bed but it wasn’t a clear-cut declaration he was going to sleep either.

“I can’t imagine I will,” she answered lightly.

It wasn’t a blatant rejection of his subtle invitation but she saw the sting in his eyes from it anyway. Maybe he was expecting her to stop her packing and snuggle up in bed for a shared nap but the slight tenting in his trousers argued that counterpoint for her.  
  
Was she ready to move forward with their relationship now? The question hung in the air over her like a sword ready to drop. There was a power she held over them both as she debated to join him again and at least partake in a shared bed to sleep.

The television turned on as Mulder’s needed lullaby and she looked down at the briefcase as she pulled the zipper.

If she walked across the room to see him, it wouldn’t be for sleep and she still had too many questions. Did this mean that all was forgiven? Was this more backtracking in their attempts to date each other while they were living through a trial separation? Her body didn’t want answers to those questions. It wanted the heated touch of a hand that knew her intimately. The answers would have to wait until her body found a release that only he could provide.

“Then again, it’s not out of the realm of extreme possibilities,” she whispered to herself.

She bit her lower lip as she crossed the room to their adjoining door and opened it. Mulder was leaning against the frame with a knowing look on his face and his jacket still slung over his arm.

He could be posing for an advertisement for a male enhancement drug with the words ‘when it’s the right time’ hanging over his head. Mulder wasn’t the guy who needed that kind of help in any way. She wondered how his testosterone levels had remained so high at his age but he still had a great head of hair, his muscular tissue didn’t show any signs of degeneration and he hardly complained about the regular maladies that affected many men his age. Occasionally, he would say his back or his knees hurt after a day of yard work or fixing things around the house while refusing any help. Scully chalked that up to karma coming back to remind him he was no island.

The beat between the door opening and her speaking first felt longer than necessary but perhaps it was nerves.

“Hey,” she greeted.

“Hey,” he returned as he set his jacket on the dresser next to the door.

Mulder grabbed her head and pulled her to him in a kiss that was both passionate and tender. She grabbed the material of his shirt and whimpered into his mouth. Her sex was throbbing again and this time it was in anticipation and remembrance of what was to come.

She wanted to drape her body over his, feel him inside her tight walls and taste him in her mouth. They were maneuvering towards the bathroom without a word. Before she could ask what he was doing, he was pulling her jacket open and off her body to throw the item on the floor.

Her fingers left his hair and opened the remaining buttons on his shirt. It joined her jacket next to the bath mat and they broke the kiss to remove their shoes and pants and kick them collectively towards the doorway.

“What are we doing in here?” Scully asked as Mulder released the clasp on her bra.

“I just had a fistfight with my double and I put up a good effort on each end. I was rolling around on the dusty floor of a very unclean house,” he explained as he threw her bra into the sink. He turned the tap on and then shed his boxer shorts. “And you know how I don’t like to do anything alone.”

Scully stepped out of her panties and joined him in the stall where steam was filling the air surrounding the stream of water. Mulder pulled her towards him in the tub and began kissing her with the water hitting her back. It was a little too hot, it made her skin ache with each droplet that touched her but it was exactly what she wanted. She wanted him to make her forget the pain and anguish they caused each other by breaking their vows. They failed more than just themselves. They couldn’t keep their own son safe from the conspiracies they tried to unravel. They were pessimistic to think that miracles wouldn’t happen for them and naive enough to think they could protect him from what they were involved in.

She needed him to make her forget the bad they endured together and because of each other. She wanted him to help her remember only what was good. His hands could delight and inspire the most exquisite of releases. He had a tongue that knew the edges of every curve of her body. He had seen and tasted the most private spots of her body. He had experienced it all and wanted her in spite of it.

Mulder’s hand left her backside and picked up the soap to lather across her skin and his. He was a great multitasker, that much had been proven in the past.

Eventually, he broke the kiss and pushed her against the wall of the shower. He massaged the bubbles from the soap into her breasts and down her body. As his fingers reached around her hips and met the curve of her ass, she gasped.

“Don’t worry,” he said as his feet spread wider in the tub and their faces aligned. “That’s the _finale_ , not the show opener.”

“This isn’t the _second_ act?” she asked as he moved one hand toward her front.

Mulder looked as though he was giving her question a real thought. “I don’t mean to be selfish, Scully but I always considered that once I come, the show is _over_. So now that we’ve started again, this is a _whole new_ production.”

His lips captured hers before she could respond. His tongue took inventory of her mouth while his fingers slipped between her thighs to find her sex wet and throbbing.

The reaction her body had to his would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so fortuitous for their plans. Mulder kissed her properly and with the kind of tenderness that she needed. He held her body with the kind of force that made her feel alive and desired. He was the kind of man who paid attention to every sound she made and watched her face to study each way he skillfully made her come.

She gasped as she broke the kiss as two fingers pushed inside of her. She wondered if he could still feel the aftermath of their previous coupling on his fingers as he began to fuck her with a gentle rhythm.

His mouth began to trail kisses down her neck and she could feel his teeth marking her. One bite at the tendon, a lick and a short suckling of her skin would create a small oblong bruise she would be forced to cover with makeup in the morning.

At the moment, she wasn’t thinking about tomorrow morning or the inconvenience of Mulder’s love bites. She was only wanting more. More of his hand moving inside of her while the evidence of his desire pressed into her hip. More of his mouth trailing sensations on her skin that went straight to her sex.

Her fingers were scratching up the wet skin on his back and she knew tomorrow he would have the evidence of this joining to carry under his jacket as well.

Mulder released her ass and pushed her hand between them. She didn’t need to be prompted now. She was feeling bold, brazen and needy for her release. The soft pad of her middle finger found the bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs and she moaned loudly. Her cries during sex were amplified in the small enclosure but the possibility there could be another knock from the motel manager was outweighed by what they were doing to her body.

His fingers pumped in and out while his breath was hot on her neck. His teeth pulled on her alabaster skin as she felt herself building to deliverance from the tension he was creating. It would be sharp, acute and exquisite.

That was the problem with someone like Mulder. The sex was so addicting that she found the entire thing entirely too distracting during their first year together. She would find herself daydreaming about the things Mulder could do to her. He never left her wanting more but became insatiable to match his appetites.

Scully removed her nails from Mulder’s back and reached between them to stroke him. His open mouth ran along her neck until he reached her shoulder and bit down on her joint gently.

He whispered her name as she moved her hand up his dick to the tip and rubbed her thumb along the head. He pumped his hips in tandem, keeping his fingers moving inside her tight walls.

Just when she felt herself beginning to close in on a release, Mulder pulled away, his hands leaving her sex and his dick out of reach.

“ _Mu_ -” she began to protest.

“Bed,” he ordered as he pulled her under the water to rinse off the soap from their bodies. “I need you in a bed.”

“ _Oh_ -” she started but he was already throwing open the shower curtain and turning off the faucet.

She was lucky her legs were moving because as he grabbed a hold of her wrist and pulled her from the bathroom, snagging two towels along the way. They were in her room now with their wet bodies dripping water onto the floor. Her hair was mostly dry but their bodies were still slippery from their shared shower.

He pulled a towel across his torso before using a fresh one across her skin. As he turned to discard the damp fabric, she lowered herself down onto her knees to take him into her mouth. He could barely whisper her name as she took the entirety of his shaft in her mouth so the very tip of it had reached the top of her throat.

“ _Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck_ ,” he groaned long and low.

It wasn’t about the power or control she had over him while she did this but she had a surge of that influx anyway. He felt good in her mouth and it gave her a rush of excitement.

As a young woman, it was spoken about in hushed tones as an untoward and improper act. The joke around her Catholic high school was that it was safer than intercourse but could give you a heck of a sore throat if you weren’t careful. There were a few jokes among the graduating class about other such acts but sodomy was considered an Old Testament sin and therefore put you on a list of girls on the wall of the boy’s bathroom.

Dana Scully might not have shown up on such a list but she did have her share of snake handling secrets - something Mulder had been benefiting since their romance started almost twenty years prior. She enjoyed the way the saltiness of his precum felt on her tongue and the thin, delicate skin around his shaft felt against her teeth. There was a shift in control between Mulder and Scully once she did that.

Instead of demeaning her, it influenced Mulder just slightly to be wildly more compliant with everything else she asked of him. Take out the trash, have the bed made before she came over or pick her up a coffee on the way in to work. The man was highly suggestible after the mere act of pleasuring him with teeth, tongue and lips took place. It was hard to forget the silly smile he walked around with on his face for two days after the first time.

Maybe it had been the seven years of celibacy prior to their initial sexual encounter but the man was pretty grateful. So grateful that he returned the favour for over an hour afterwards, not that she was counting but she had.

At this moment, she had a feeling the Mulder that would walk out of that motel room in a few hours time would also be more compliant and willing to please her. That wasn’t why she was doing this. She didn’t want to get her way on a stale argument or to finally settle a score in her favour. She just needed to feel this thrill of taking him in and controlling the entirety of his release as he had hers earlier that night.

Mulder was standing in the middle of her bedroom with his hips swaying slightly and his hands opening and clenching into fists. He let out huffs of air as she kept her pace while his head tilted back to look to the heavens to pray thanks to a god he didn’t believe in.

Her cheeks hollowed to increase the suction as she pulled her mouth up his shaft. She tried to continue that pressure as she took him down further. It was a mix of her tongue working to lubricate his cock while she kept a steady rhythm to get him to his own brink of liberation from his desires.

As she bobbed her head up and down and grasped the base of his shaft with her forefinger and thumb, he groaned loudly and his hands twitched at his sides. He was doing everything in his power not to grab her by the hair. It was difficult for Mulder, a man of impulse, to control those catalysts to his basic incitements of fancy.

She knew what he could do while he held on to her hips and fucked her. She was grateful that he didn’t use her mouth for such primal moments. She didn’t know how she would handle that.

As her tongue circled the tip of his dick and she was about to move back down to his shaft, Mulder grabbed her by the shoulders and tossed her onto the bed. She bounced once as he climbed on top of her with a hungry look in his eyes.

“Mulder!” she cried in admonishment but he wasn’t going to be dissuaded.

“You can’t do that, Scully,” he told her authoritatively. “You just can’t do that and leave me with the feeling that I still need to fuck you.”

Scully moved her still damp body up the bed but he grabbed her legs and pulled her towards him. She had a brief thought to try to get away but having him inside of her was the end goal. She just wasn’t sure how he was going to do it.

Maybe that’s what startled her.

“Don’t move,” he growled as he pulled her towards him and laid his palm flat on her belly.

His eyes were wild and he was taking in the sight of her flesh. She was pink everywhere he had been grabbing and red in the spots his mouth had caught.

“You’re so _beautiful_ , Scully,” he said with awe. “Do I tell you that enough?”

He looked up from her naked body to her face and she saw a genuine worry in his eyes. He told her all the time. Maybe it was her insecure questions that had him wondering but he was complimentary. There wasn’t much he could do about her insecurities and her fears of being thought of as old or past her prime were founded. Everywhere she looked there were young, nubile women who were apt to do the things she did to him when they worked past their emotional garbage and found a common ground.

“You do,” she assured him.

Mulder looked down at her feet for a minute. His eyes travelled up her legs to her sex and then focused on her breasts before meeting her eyes. “I love you.”

She was about to respond but he was grabbing her hips and flipping her over onto her stomach before she could say a word. “Mu-”

He pulled her hips up in the air as her face pressed into her forearms while her elbows dug into the mattress. This was about to be it.

His hand smoothed along her backside and he smacked it lightly before entering her in one thrust.

“Fuck!” she cried out and he let out a guttural moan. “Oh… Mulder… fuck…. me…”

“I-” Mulder pulled his hips back and pumped hard into her. “ _Am_.”

The man just couldn’t help putting a literal comment into that moment. It would drive her crazy if he wasn’t already driving her crazy.

His fingers dug into the flesh on her hips and she was holding on to the bedspread with dear life as he fucked her mercilessly. With his next thrust, she put one hand on her belly and felt her organs being rearranged by his cock.

“Touch yourself,” he whispered as he slowed his rhythm. “I want to feel you come around me.”

Scully pressed her forehead harder into her arm while her finger pressed into her clit. She felt close before and even with multiple orgasms being something she had been granted with, she wasn’t sure how she could right now. It had been a long day, a longer night and she was disjointed from lack of sleep.

Mulder stopped his hips and smoothed his hands down the curves of her waist. He was twitching inside and she wondered if he was close. When she looked over her shoulder, he was watching her intently.

His eyes were wild and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. The water had dried across his taught chest muscles and she could see them flexing as he massaged the cheeks of her ass.

“I wanted to…” Mulder started and shook his head. “I had so many plans for you.”

“You could have them another time,” she suggested as they finally made eye contact.

“It’s really disarming to see you looking at me like that while I’m inside you like this,” he commented and flexed his hips so he pushed in just a little deeper. “God… woman you’re magnificent.”

“ _Woman_?” she repeated as she brushed her finger across the swollen lips of her sex again. “Woman?”

“You’re a _good_ woman,” he insisted as he pulled his hips back to thrust in again. “You’re so… _so good_ to me, Dana.”

Sometimes in moments like these, her given name didn’t sound as foreign to her ears as it did in lucid moments of banter among their files, exchanging theories. He whispered her given name and called Scully out to the heavens when she was out of sight from his presence and fear struck him for her safety. He cried the name he insisted on calling her to keep her at bay in moments of distress but whispered the name she was given at birth.

Mulder paused his body as she grazed the base of his cock with her fingertips. She was swollen, tight and the precipice of the steep commute into deliverance was just at her literal fingertips. She was almost there. Her clit felt raw but she kept pushing against it for her release to finally happen.

Mulder grunted as her womb flexed and suddenly a rush of fluid pushed out from her sex to soak his balls.

“Oh, fuck, Scully,” he said in awe.

It had been a while since that had happened. It wasn’t a secret that Mulder felt a thrill when that happened during love making. It was less of a secret that Mulder was a bit of a pervert about such things but she didn’t mind it.

He began pummelling into her with a roughness that only prolonged her orgasm. She wailed out his name as he fucked her. She kept pushing her fingers against the swollen lips of her pussy and he let out a guttural moan as he erratically finished, emptying into her again.

“ _Shit_ ,” he panted and she looked over her shoulder to see him wiping his brow.

She glanced around the bed to see one of their towels just at the edge. “Can you hand me that?”

“The bedspread is already a little-”

“I don’t care,” she cut him off as she held out her hand.

Mulder grunted as he grabbed the towel and handed it to her so she could place it under her torso while he pulled out.

She let out a hiss and she caught the expression on his face. “I’m fine.”

Mulder raised a skeptical eyebrow that mimicked some of her best. “ _Really_?”

“Twice in one night…” she began and felt the pangs around her sex. “I think there’s a slight tear from all that abuse.”

“That wasn’t abuse,” he defended. “That was poetry of the human form.”

“You were a little rough,” she commented and he nodded. “Not that I mind it.”

“I know _that_ ,” he replied with a laugh.

Scully maneuvered herself off the bed to use the bathroom. When she returned, he was using the other towel to clean himself off. He took a seat on the edge of the bed with an expectant look on his face.

“Scully-” he began as he tossed the towel on the dresser.

“I _know_ we need to talk,” she interrupted with her hands up in a defensive gesture. He nodded in agreement. “But for the love of God, can we just get a _few hours_ of sleep before that happens?”

He opened his mouth and she was sure he was about to argue with her, just for the sake of arguments. Instead he closed his jaw and nodded.

“Can I bunk over?” he asked as she pulled back the sheets on the bed. “I think there’s still a wet spot on my bed.”

She shook her head as she laughed. “Okay but I don’t want to hear any jokes tomorrow about what happened there.”

Scully’s index finger pointed at the bedspread where she had just come and Mulder put a hand on his chest as to ask ‘who me?’

“I’m serious, Fox Mulder,” she warned him.

When she called him by his first and last name, that genuinely meant business and it was usually on a personal matter.

Mulder drew an invisible cross with his index finger and climbed into bed next to her. “Okay.”

She laid on her side, facing away from him and she felt Mulder shift on the bed next to her. She rolled over to look at him and he was looking up at the ceiling as he drummed his fingers on his chest.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Mulder looked at her and grinned. “I’m better than okay.”

He moved his arm up and patted the place on his chest she liked to sleep on. The steady beat of his heart was a better lullaby than anything else.

“Come here,” he invited. “You can drool on my chest.”

She chuffed a laugh as she snuggled closer to him. “Thank you.”

It took thirty seconds before she found herself in a deep sleep with Mulder’s arm rubbing her back and the television still playing in the distance.

 

***** *** *****

 

The morning rain awoke her first. Mulder was on his back with a soft snoring coming from his mouth. When Scully looked at the clock, she was grateful she had at least five hours of uninterrupted sleep. It wasn’t a solid night’s rest but it made a huge improvement on what she had compared to the rest of the week.

Scully got out of bed and took a quick shower. She brushed her teeth and washed her face free from the makeup she had yet to wash off from the day before. After she dressed in jeans and a sweater, she pulled her hair into a ponytail and left to get them some decent coffee and some breakfast.

She turned the television off, left a note on the bedside table and left Mulder sleeping in the bed with his torso covered by the sheets and his feet sticking out from the bottom. He looked peaceful and almost a little happy.

It took her twenty minutes to pick up coffee and two breakfast sandwiches. When she returned, Mulder was in the shower and the television in her room was on, playing a news report from the local station.

“Mulder,” she called as she kicked the door closed with her foot. She set the beverage tray on the table and the food bag next to it. “I’m back.”

The shower turned off and he exited the bathroom with a towel around his waist and a toothbrush in his cheek. “Coffee?”

“And food,” she said as she pointed to the bag.

Mulder crossed into his part of the suite to put on some clothes. He re-entered her bedroom without the toothbrush, wearing jeans he had yet to zip up and a T-shirt in hand. The boxer shorts under his jeans were a bright pink and she wondered when in the hell he ever purchased those.

Scully felt out of place in the bedroom. The sex they had the night before was lingering in the air and she wasn’t sure how they were supposed to proceed. She didn’t know if she could even ask about the underwear he had on.

“Laundry mishap,” he commented as he pulled his shirt on over his head. “My boxers.”

“Red sock in the whites?” she asked.

“ _No_ ,” he said with a shake of his head as he zipped up his jeans. “A nice new tie that now looks like a Rorschach test.”

That made her feel a little better. “ _Oh._ ”

He crossed over to her and pulled her into a hug. He kissed the top of her head as her arms wrapped around his waist.

“Good morning,” he whispered.

“Good morning,” she returned as she revelled in the embrace and comfort a simple hug could provide.

His hand smoothed down the hair she had tied up. “I like the ponytail. It’s the ultimate sign of a _casual_ Scully.”

She looked up at him. “You know all my sides.”

“I think you know mine,” he countered as she looked up into his eyes. She saw the next statement on his face before he could say it. She wished he wouldn’t go there but that was her fear talking. “Especially the one you couldn’t stand to watch lose himself in the darkness.”

“Mulder-” she protested.

This was the conversation they hadn't had yet. The conversation they tried to have many times but ended up in bed together instead.

“I’ve been thinking how unfair all of this was to you, four years ago,” he pressed on. “I mean, it made sense you had to leave.”

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise and she tried to step back from him but his grip around her tightened. “Mulder-”

“I need you close to me while I say this,” he insisted. “I don’t want you to shut yourself off from what I’m trying to tell you.”

She nodded in understanding. Mulder knew how she could react when getting information that cut especially deep. She pushed past her gut reaction and tried to relax.

“I’m _not mad_ and I don’t resent you leaving,” he insisted. “I accept the blame for my own disappearance down the rabbit hole of the labyrinth I believed was unfolding. I believe even more in what you saw when you were in the hospital and maybe it’s all tied together but my methods of trying to prove it were all wrong. I was searching for answers outside of what you had told me… I think the answers I needed were always in you.”

She wasn’t sure it was possible for her heart to break while it mended back together at the same time before that moment.

“I shouldn’t have left,” she replied softly. “I chose my own self-”

“Scully, you chose me so many times, I think I was glad to see you put yourself first,” he assured her. “You deserve to be put first. You chose me, you chose the safety of our son, you chose the X-files all over what was probably best for you.”

“Being with you was _always_ the right choice, Mulder,” she affirmed and she cleared her throat. “I wouldn’t change a day of what we had together. I just wish… I wish I was stronger or that I believed you sooner. It’s all tied together. I’m sure of it.”

“ _Now_ she believes me,” he muttered jokingly and they both laughed. There was a beat hanging between them and Mulder let out a steadying breath. “I love you, Scully. I never stopped.”

She looked up to him as he was holding her. Her chin clenched and she nodded as she understood what he was saying. This was their new beginning. They were going to walk out of that motel room without the questions of who they were to each other lingering anymore. It was now or never, this was it.

“I love you too,” she replied. “Now and always.”

“Until forever,” he promised.

His mouth pressed against her lips in a soft kiss of promise. It was a new vow and a symbol of their pledge to each other. It wasn’t conventional but when had they ever done anything in a typical fashion?

She could accept this new beginning. She wanted it as much as he did. They owed it to each other to try again and leave the fear, resentment and anger behind them. It had no place in their future.

“Come on,” Mulder said as he stepped back. “Let’s go home.”

Home sounded perfect.

 


End file.
